The Last Thing He Wanted (19 page)

He’s dead, Nettie, what am I going to do,
she heard him ask, soprano.

He seemed to be in the vicinity of his office.

Why, you’re going to stay here with me,
she heard him answer himself, alto.
Main thing is to keep on living, keep on caring what’s going to happen.

He seemed now to be in the kitchen.

“Paul has a genuine theatrical flair,” she heard Bob Weir say.

She said nothing.

“ ‘
Neh-ver,
no
neh-ver,
walk
ah-lone,
’ ” Paul Schuster was singing as he returned. He was carrying a full pitcher of punch. “All’s well that ends well. We
dine
at eight-thirty.”

“Maybe I should have mentioned this before,” Bob Weir said. “I didn’t come by to eat.”

Elena said nothing.

“I’ve lived down here long enough to know,” Paul Schuster had said. “Sometimes you have to take a strong position. Isn’t that so, Elise?”

Elena said that she supposed it was so.

Paul Schuster picked up the pitcher of punch and filled his glass.

Elena said no more for me thank you.

Paul Schuster wheeled to face Elena. “Who asked you,” he said.

“You’re driving the cattle right through the fence,” Bob Weir said to Paul Schuster.

“I think you must be stupid,” Paul Schuster had said to Elena. He was standing over her, holding the pitcher of punch. “Are you stupid? Just how stupid are you? Are you stupid enough to just sit there while I do this?”

She looked up at him just in time to get the full stream of punch in her eyes.

“And since you’re the one drove the cattle through it,” she heard Bob Weir say to Paul Schuster, “you better goddamn well mend it.”

She had gotten up, the sticky punch still running down her hair and face, her eyes stinging from the citrus, and walked into the empty hotel and up the stairs. That was the night she stood in the rusted bathtub and let the shower run over her for a full ten minutes, the drought and the empty cistern and the well going dry notwithstanding. That was also the night she called Catherine at the house in Malibu and told her that she would try to be home before school started.

“Home where,” Catherine had asked, wary.

There had been a silence.

“Home wherever you are,” Elena had said finally.

After she hung up she pulled a chair to the window and sat in the dark, looking out at the sea. At one point she heard raised voices downstairs, and then the sound of cars backing out the gravel driveway.

More than one car.

Two cars.

Paul Schuster was still downstairs, she could hear him.

Which meant that someone other than Bob Weir must have come by.

She told herself that Paul Schuster had been drinking
and would apologize in the morning, that whatever the business about the airport had been it was something between him and Bob Weir and whoever else had arrived after she came upstairs, nothing to do with her, but when she woke in the morning she played back in her mind the sound of the raised voices. She had been listening the night before for Bob Weir’s voice and she had been listening the night before for Paul Schuster’s voice but only when she woke in the morning was she able to separate out a third voice.

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

Transit passenger, not our deal.

It was when she separated out the voice of the Salvadoran that she understood that she would need to find someplace else to stay.

Someplace where the airport would not be an issue.

Whatever the issue was.

Someplace where the Salvadoran would not appear.

Someplace where she would not have to see Paul Schuster.

Someplace where he could not find out who she was.

At the time later that morning when Treat Morrison walked into the Intercon coffee shop and saw Elena McMahon sitting alone at the round table set for eight there remained a number of things she did not understand.

The first thing Elena McMahon did not understand was that Paul Schuster already knew who she was.

Paul Schuster had known all along who she was.

She was Dick McMahon’s daughter.

She was who they had to front the deal since they did not have Dick McMahon.

Paul Schuster had known this ever since Bob Weir told him to hire her.

Told him to hire her and send her to the airport every morning.

Send her to the airport every morning to establish a pattern.

A pattern that would coincide with Alex Brokaw’s weekly trips to San José.

Until now, Paul Schuster had always done what Bob Weir told him to do. The reason Paul Schuster had always done what Bob Weir told him to do (until now) was that Bob Weir had knowledge of certain minor drug deals in which Paul Schuster had been involved. This knowledge on Bob Weir’s part had seemed to Paul Schuster more significant than it might have seemed because one of the federal agencies with which Bob Weir had a connection was the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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

W
hen 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 García 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.