The Last Thing He Wanted

by Joan Didion

  However.

  This knowledge was not in the end sufficiently significant to ensure that Paul Schuster would have gone to the airport with Elena McMahon on that particular morning.

  And believe me, there’s still a big if in this situation, and the big if is moi.

  Paul Schuster might not be the smartest nelly on the block, but when he saw a hint he knew how to take it.

  Pas de airport.

  What had been meant to happen at the airport that morning was something else Elena McMahon did not understand.

  Treat Morrison understood more.

  Treat Morrison understood for example that “Bob Weir” was the name used in this part of the world by a certain individual who, were he to reenter the United States, would face outstanding charges for exporting weapons in violation of five federal statutes. Treat Morrison also understood that this certain individual, whose actual name as entered in the charges against him was Max Epperson, could not in fact, for this and other reasons, reenter the United States.

  What Treat Morrison understood was a good deal more than what Elena McMahon understood, but in the end Treat Morrison still did not understand enough. Treat Morrison did not for example understand that Max Epperson, also known as “Bob Weir,” had in fact reentered the United States, and quite recently.

  Max Epperson had reentered the United States by the process, actually not all that uncommon, known as “going in black,” making prior covert arrangement to circumvent normal immigration procedures.

  First in the early spring of 1984, and a second time in June of 1984, Max Epperson had reentered the United States without passing through immigration control, entering in the first instance via a military plane that landed at Homestead AFB and in the second via a commercial flight to Grand Cayman and a United States Coast Guard vessel into the Port of Miami. The first reentry had been for the express purpose of setting up a certain deal with a longtime partner. The second reentry had been for the express purpose of confirming this deal.

  Making sure that this deal would go down on schedule and as planned.

  Ensuring that the execution of the deal would leave no window for variation from its intention.

  Impressing the urgency of this on Dick McMahon.

  Max Epperson’s longtime partner.

  Max Epperson’s old friend.

  Who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

  Max Epperson’s backup in uncounted deals, including the ones on which he faced charges.

  Somebody had to talk reason to Epperson, Dick McMahon had said to Elena the first morning at Jackson Memorial. Epperson could queer the whole deal, Epperson was off the reservation, didn’t know the first thing about the business he was in.

  It will have occurred to you that Max Epperson, in order to so reenter the United States, in order to go in black, necessarily had the cooperation of a federal agency authorized to conduct clandestine operations. As far as Treat Morrison went, it would have gone without saying that Max Epperson could have had the cooperation of a federal agency authorized to conduct clandestine operations. Max Epperson would naturally have been transformed, at the time the federal weapons charges were brought against him, into a professional informant, an asset for hire. The transformation of Max Epperson into the professional known as “Bob Weir” would have been the purpose in bringing the charges in the first place. This was an equation Treat Morrison, distracted or not distracted, could have done in his sleep. What Treat Morrison had failed to figure was the extent to which his seeing Elena McMahon in the Intercon coffee shop would modify the equation.

  She would still be the front, but Alex Brokaw would no longer be the target.

  I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in, she had said to her father that morning at Jackson Memorial.

  Christ, what business are they all in, her father had said to her.

  Five

  1

  When I look back now on, what happened I see mainly fragments, flashes, a momentary phantasmagoria in which everyone focused on some different aspect and nobody at all saw the whole.

  I had been down there only two days when it happened.

  Treat Morrison had not wanted me to come down at all.

  I had told him before he left Washington that in order to write the piece I wanted to write it would be essential to see him in action, see him in situ, observe him inserting himself into a certain kind of situation. He had seemed at the time to concede the efficacy of such a visit, but any such concession had been, I realized quite soon, only in principle.

  Only in the abstract.

  Only until he got down there.

  When I called to say-that I was coming down he did not exactly put me off, but neither did he offer undue encouragement.

  Actually it was turning out to be kind of a fluid situation, he said on the telephone.

  Actually he wasn’t certain how long he’d be there.

  Actually if he was there at all, he was going to be pretty much tied up.

  Actually we could talk a hell of a lot more productively in Washington.

  I decided to break the impasse.

  At that time I happened to own a few shares of Morrison Knudsen stock, and it had recently occurred to me, when I received an annual report mentioning Morrison Knudsen’s role in a new landing facility under construction on the island, that this otherwise uninteresting island to which Treat Morrison had so abruptly decamped might be about to become a new Ilopango, a new Palmerola, a staging area for the next transformation of the war we were not fighting.

  I looked at the clock, then asked Treat Morrison about the landing facility.

  He was silent for exactly seven seconds, the length of time it took him to calculate that I would be more effectively managed if allowed to come down than left on my own reading annual reports.

  But hell, he said then. It’s your ticket, it’s a free country, you do what you want.

  What I did not know even after I got there was that the reason he had resisted my visit was in this instance not professional but personal. Because by seven o’clock on the evening of the day he arrived, although only certain people at the embassy knew it, Treat Morrison had managed to meet the woman he had seen eight hours before in the Intercon coffee shop. Two hours after that, he knew enough about her situation to place the call to Washington that got the DIA agent down in the morning.

  That was the difference between him and the Harvard guys.

  He listened.

  2

  I have no idea what was in her mind when she told him who she was.

  Which she flat-out did. Volunteered it.

  She was not Elise Meyer, she was Elena McMahon.

  She told him that within less than a minute after she went upstairs to his room with him that evening.

  Maybe she recognized him from around Washington, maybe she thought he might recognize her from around Washington, maybe she had been feral too long, alert in the wild too long.

  Maybe she just looked at him and she trusted him. Because believe me, Elena McMahon had no particular reason, at that particular moment, to tell a perfect stranger, a perfect stranger who had for reasons she did not know approached her in the lobby of the Intercon, what she had not told anyone else.

  I mean she had no idea in the world that had she gone to the airport at ten that morning Alex Brokaw would have been dead that night.

  Of course Alex Brokaw was at the airport at ten, because he had delayed his weekly flight to San José in order to brief Treat Morrison.

  Of course Alex Brokaw was still alive that night, because Dick McMahon’s daughter had not been at the airport.

  Of course.

  We now know that, but she did not.

  I mean she knew nothing.

  She did not know that the Salvadoran whose voice she had most recently heard the night before trying to mediate whatever the argument had been between Paul Schuster and Bob Weir was Bob Weir’s old friend from San Salvador, Colonel Álvaro G
arcía Steiner.

  Deal me out, Paul Schuster had kept saying. Just deal me out.

  You have a problem, Bob Weir had kept saying.

  There is no problem, the Salvadoran had kept saying.

  She did not even know that Paul Schuster had died that morning in his office at the Surfrider. According to the local police, who as it happened were now receiving the same training in counterterrorism from Colonel Álvaro García Steiner that Colonel Álvaro García Steiner had received from the Argentinians, there was no evidence that anyone else had been present in the office in the hours immediately preceding or following the death. Toxicological studies suggested an overdose of secobarbital.

  It was late that first day, when he came back to the Intercon from the embassy, that Treat Morrison again noticed the woman he had seen that morning in the coffee shop.

  He had been picking up his messages at the reception desk, about to go upstairs.

  She had seemed to be pleading with the clerk, trying to get a room.

  Nothing for you, the clerk had kept repeating. One hundred and ten percent booked.

  I found a place I can move into tomorrow, she had kept repeating. I just need tonight. I just need a closet. I just need a rollaway in an office.

  One hundred and ten percent booked.

  Of course Treat Morrison intervened.

  Of course he told the clerk to double up on one of the USG bookings, let him free up a room for her.

  He had more than one reason to free up a USG room for her.

  He had every reason to free up a USG room for her.

  He already knew that she had arrived on the island on July 2 on an apparently falsified American passport issued in the name Elise Meyer. He had already been briefed on the progress of the continuing FBI investigation meant to ascertain who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there. It went without saying that he would tell the clerk to free up a room for her. Just as it went without saying that he would suggest a drink in the bar while the clerk worked out the logistics.

  She had ordered a Coca-Cola.

  He had ordered an Early Times and soda.

  She thanked him for his intervention.

  She said that she had been staying in a place on the windward side and had been looking all day for a new place, but could not move into the place she wanted until the following day.

  So she would be gone tomorrow.

  She could promise him that.

  No problem, he said.

  She said nothing.

  In fact she said nothing more until the drinks arrived, had seemed to retreat into herself in a way that reminded him of Diane.

  Diane when she was sick.

  Not Diane before.

  When the drinks arrived she peeled the paper wrapping off a straw and stuck the straw between the ice cubes and, without ever lifting the glass from the table, drained half the Coca-Cola.

  He watched this and found himself with nothing to say.

  She looked at him.

  “My father used to order Early Times,” she said.

  He asked if her father was alive.

  There had been a silence then.

  “I need to talk to you alone,” she had said finally.

  I told you.

  I have no idea.

  Maybe she told him who she was because he ordered Early Times. Maybe she looked at him and saw the fog off the Farallons, maybe he looked at her and saw the hot desert twilight. Maybe they looked at each other and knew that nothing they could do would matter as much as the slightest tremor of the earth, the blind trembling of the Pacific in its bowl, the heavy snows closing the mountain passes, the rattlers in the dry grass, the sharks cruising the deep cold water through the Golden Gate.

  The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

  Oh yes.

  This is a romance after all.

  One more romance.

  3

  I recently tried to talk to Mark Berquist about what happened down there.

  I know Mark Berquist slightly, everybody now knows Mark Berquist.

  Youngest member of the youngest class ever elected to the United States Senate. The class that hit the ground running, the class that arrived on the Hill lean mean and good to go. Author of Constitutional Coercion: Whose Rights Come First? Maker of waves, reliable antagonist on the Sunday shows, most frequently requested speaker on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar-plus-full-expenses circuit.

  Where his remarks were invariably distorted out of context by the media.

  So invariably, his administrative aide advised me, that the senator was understandably wary about returning calls from the media.

  “Wait just one minute,” he said when I finally managed to waylay him, in the corridor outside a hearing, at a moment when the television crews who normally functioned as his protective shield had been temporarily diverted by a rumor that the President’s wife had just entered the rotunda with Robert Redford. “I only speak to media on background.”

  I said that background was all I wanted.

  I said that I was trying to get as much perspective as possible on a certain incident that had occurred in 1984.

  Mark Berquist’s eyes flickered suspiciously. Nineteen eighty-four had ended for him with the conclusion of that year’s legislative session, and was as distant now as the Continental Congress. To bring up 1984 implied that the past had consequences, which in situ was not seen as a useful approach. This unspoken suggestion of consequences was in fact sufficiently unthinkable as to drive Mark Berquist to mount a broad-based defense.

  “If this has anything to do with the period of the financing of the 1984 reelection campaign you can just file and forget,” Mark Berquist said. “Since, and let me assure you that this is perfectly well documented, I didn’t even move over to the executive branch until after the second inaugural.”

  I said that the period of the financing of the 1984 reelection campaign was not specifically the period I had in mind.

  The period I had in mind was more the period of the resupply to the Nicaraguan contra forces.

  “In the first place any reference to the so-called contra forces would be totally inaccurate,” Mark Berquist said. “In the second place any reference to the so-called resupply would be totally inaccurate.”

  I suggested that both “contra” and “resupply” had become in the intervening years pretty much accepted usage for the forces and events in question.

  “I would be extremely interested in seeing any literature that used either term,” Mark Berquist said.

  I suggested that he could see such literature by having his staff call the Government Printing Office and ask for the February 1987 Report of the President’s Special Review Board, the November 1987 Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, and the August 1993 Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.

  There was a silence.

  “These are matters about which there has already been quite enough misrepresentation and politicalization,” Mark Berquist said then. “And to which I have no intention of contributing. However. Just let me say that anyone who uses the terms you used just betrays their ignorance, really. And to call it ignorance is putting the best face on it. Because it’s something worse, really.”

  I asked what it really was.

  “The cheapest kind of political bias. That’s what the media never understood.” He looked down the corridor as if for his missing press escort, then at his watch. “All right, one more shot. Your best question.”

  “On the record,” I said, only reflexively, since whether it was on the record was of no real interest to me.

  “Negative. No. You agreed to the ground rules. On background only.”

  The reason it was of no real interest to me whether this was on the record or on background was because Mark Berquist would never in his life tell me the one thing I wanted to know.

  The one thing I wanted to know from Mark Berquist was not at what point the
target had stopped being Alex Brokaw. I knew at what point the target had stopped being Alex Brokaw: the target had stopped being Alex Brokaw when Elena McMahon left the Surfrider, did not go to the airport, lost her potential proximity to Alex Brokaw. The one thing I wanted to know from Mark Berquist was at what point exactly he had known that the target had changed from Alex Brokaw to Treat Morrison.

  I asked Mark Berquist this.

  One shot, best question.

  Mark Berquist’s answer was this: “I can see you’ve bought hook, line and sinker into one of those sick conspiracy fantasies that, let me assure you, have been thoroughly and totally discredited and really, I mean time and time again. And again, calling this kind of smear job sick is putting the best face on it.”

  More colliding metaphors.

  On background only.

  4

  It played out, when the time came, very quickly. For the last nine of the ten days he had been on the island they had been meeting at the place she had found, an anonymous locally owned motel, not a chain, the chains were by then fully booked for USG personnel, a two-story structure near the airport so unremarkable that you could have driven to the airport a dozen times a day and never noticed it was there.

  The Aero Sands Beach Resort.

  The Aero Sands was on a low bluff between the highway and the beach, not really a beach but a tidal flat on which some fill had been thrown to protect the eroding bluff. The bluff ended where the highway curved down to the water just south of the Aero Sands, but on the bluff a hundred or so yards north of the Aero Sands there was a small shopping center, a grocery and a liquor store and a video rental place and outlets for sports supplies and auto parts, and it was in the parking lot of this shopping center that Treat Morrison would leave his car.