The Last Thing He Wanted

1

Some real things have happened lately. For a while we felt rich and then we didn’t. For a while we thought time was money, find the time and the money comes with it. Make money for example by flying the Concorde. Moving fast. Get the big suite, the multi-line telephones, get room service on one, get the valet on two, premium service, out by nine back by one. Download all data. Uplink Prague, get some conference calls going. Sell Allied Signal, buy Cypress Minerals, work the management plays. Plug into this news cycle, get the wires raw, nod out on the noise. Get me audio, someone was always saying in the nod where we were. Agence Presse is moving this story. Somewhere in the nod we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed at the time the mode in which we could beat both the clock and affect itself, but I see now that it was not. I see now that the clock was ticking. I see now that we were experiencing not weightlessness but what is interestingly described on page 1513 of the Merck Manual (Fifteenth Edition) as a sustained reactive depression, a bereavement reaction to the leaving of familiar environments. I see now that the environment we were leaving was that of feeling rich. I see now that there will be no Resolution Trust to do the workout on this particular default, but I did not see it then.

Not that I shouldn’t have.

There were hints all along, clues we should have registered, processed, sifted for their application to the general condition. Try the day we noticed that the banks had called in the paper on all the malls, try the day we noticed that somebody had called in the paper on all the banks. Try the day we noticed that when we pressed 800 to do some business in Los Angeles or New York we were no longer talking to Los Angeles or New York but to Orlando or Tucson or Greensboro, North Carolina. Try the day we noticed (this will touch a nerve with frequent fliers) the new necessity for changes of equipment at Denver, Raleigh-Durham, St. Louis. Try, as long as we are changing equipment in St. Louis, the unfinished but already bankrupt Gateway Airport Tower there, its boutiques boarded up, its oyster bar shuttered, no more terry-cloth robes in the empty cabanas and no more amenity kits in the not quite terrazzo bathrooms: this should have alerted us, should have been processed, but we were moving fast. We were traveling light. We were younger. So was she.

2

For the record this is me talking.

You know me, or think you do.

The not quite omniscient author.

No longer moving fast.

No longer traveling light.

When I resolved in 1994 to finally tell this story, register the clues I had missed ten years before, process the information before it vanished altogether, I considered reinventing myself as PAO at the embassy in question, a career foreign service officer operating under the USICA umbrella. “Lilianne Owen” was my name in that construct, a strategy I ultimately jettisoned as limiting, small-scale, an artifice to no point. She told me later, Lilianne Owen would have had to keep saying, and I learned this after the fact. As Lilianne Owen I was unconvincing even to myself. As Lilianne Owen I could not have told you half of what I knew.

I wanted to come at this straight.

I wanted to bring my own baggage and unpack it in front of you.

When I first heard this story there were elements that seemed to me questionable, details I did not trust. The facts of Elena McMahon’s life did not quite hang together. They lacked coherence. Logical connections were missing, cause and effect. I wanted the connections to materialize for you as they eventually did for me. The best story I ever told was a reef dream. This is something different.

The first time Treat Morrison ever saw Elena McMahon she was sitting alone in the coffee shop at the Intercon. He had flown down from Washington on the American that landed at ten a.m. and the embassy driver had dropped him at the Intercon to leave his bag and there was this American woman, he did not think a reporter (he knew most of the reporters who covered this part of the world, the reporters stayed close to where they believed the story was, that was the beauty of operating on an island where the story had not yet appeared on the screen), an American woman wearing a white dress and reading the classified page of the local paper and sitting alone at a round table set for eight. Something about this woman had bothered him. In the first place he did not know what she was doing there. He had known she was an American because he recognized in her voice when she spoke to a waiter the slight flat drawl of the American Southwest, but the American women left on the island were embassy or the very occasional reporter, and neither would be sitting at apparent loose ends in the Intercon coffee shop. In the second place this American woman was eating, very slowly and methodically, first a bite of one and then a bite of the other, a chocolate parfait and bacon. The chocolate parfait and bacon had definitely bothered him.

At the time Treat Morrison saw Elena McMahon eating the parfait and bacon in the coffee shop at the Intercon she had been staying not at the Intercon but out on the windward side of the island, in two adjoining rooms with an efficiency kitchen at a place called the Surfrider. When she first came to the Surfrider, in July of that summer, it had been as assistant manager, hired to be in charge of booking return flights and baby-sitters and day tours (the sugar mill plus the harbor plus the island’s single Palladian Revival great house) for the young Canadian families who had until recently favored the place because it was cheap and because its Olympic-length pool was deeper at no point than three feet. She had been introduced to the manager of the Surfrider by the man who ran the car-rental agency at the Intercon. Experience in the travel industry was mandatory, the manager of the Surfrider had said, and she had faked it, faked the story and the supporting letters of reference about the three years as social director on the Swedish cruise ship later re-flagged (this was the inspired invention, the detail that rendered the references uncheckable) by Robert Vesco. At the time she was hired the island was still getting occasional misguided tourists, not rich tourists, not the kind who required villas with swimming pools and pink sand beaches and butlers and laundresses and multiple telephone lines and fax machines and instant access to Federal Express, but tourists nonetheless, mostly depressed young American couples with backpacks and retired day-trippers from the occasional cruise ship that still put in: those less acutely able to consider time so valuable that they would spend it only in the world’s most perfect places. After the first State Department advisory the cruise ships had stopped, and after the second and more urgent advisory a week later (which coincided with the baggage handlers’ strike and the withdrawal of two of the four international air carriers with routes to the island) even the backpackers had migrated to less demonstrably imperfect destinations. The Surfrider’s Olympic-length pool had been drained. Whatever need there had been for an assistant manager had contracted, then evaporated. Elena McMahon had pointed this out to the manager but he had reasonably suggested that since her rooms would be empty in any case she might just as well stay on, and she had. She liked the place empty. She liked the way the shutters had started losing their slats. She liked the low clouds, the glitter on the sea, the pervasive smell of mildew and bananas. She liked to walk up the road from the parking lot and hear the voices from the Pentecostal church there. She liked to stand on the beach in front of the hotel and know that there was no solid land between her and Africa. “Tourism — Recolonialization by Any Other Name?” was the wishful topic at the noon brown-bag AID symposium the day Treat Morrison arrived at the embassy.

3

If you remember 1984, which I notice fewer and fewer of us care to do, you already know some of what happened to Elena McMahon that summer. You know the context, you remember the names, Theodore Shackley Clair George Dewey Clarridge Richard Secord Alan Fiers Felix Rodriguez aka “Max Gomez” John Hull Southern Air Lake Resources Stanford Technology Donald Gregg Aguacate Elliott Abrams Robert Owen aka “T.C.” Ilopango aka “Cincinnati,” all swimming together in the glare off the C-123 that fell from the sky into Nicaragua. Not many women got caught in this glare. There was one, the blonde, the shredder, the one who transposed the numbers of the account at the Credit Suisse (the account at the Credit Suisse into which the Sultan of Brunei was to transfer the ten million dollars, in case you have forgotten the minor plays), but she had only a bit part, day work, a broadly comic but not in the end a featured role.

Elena McMahon was different.

Elena McMahon got caught, but not in the glare.

If you wanted to see how she got caught you would probably begin with the documents.

There are documents, more than you might think.

Depositions, testimony, cable traffic, some of it not yet declassified but much in the public record.

You could pick up a thread or two in the usual libraries: Congress of course. The Foreign Policy Institute at Hopkins, the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown. The Sterling at Yale for the Brokaw correspondence. The Bancroft at Berkeley, where Treat Morrison’s papers went after his death.

There are the FBI interviews, none what I would call illuminating but each offering the occasional moment (the chocolate parfait and bacon is one such moment in the transcripts of the FBI interviews), the leading detail (I found it suggestive that the subject who mentioned the parfait and bacon to the FBI was not in fact Treat Morrison), the evasion so blatant that it inadvertently billboards the very fact meant to be obscured.

There are the published transcripts of the hearings before the select committee, ten volumes, two thousand five hundred and seven pages, sixty-three days of testimony arresting not only for its reliance on hydraulic imagery (there were the conduits, there was the pipeline, there was of course the diversion) but for its collateral glimpses of life on the far frontiers of the Monroe Doctrine. There was for example the airline that operated out of St. Lucia but had its headquarters in Frankfurt (Volume VII, Chapter 4, “Implementing the Decision to Take Policy Underground”) and either was or was not (conflicting testimony on this) ninety-nine percent owned by a former Air West flight attendant who either did or did not live on St. Lucia. There was for example the team of unidentified men (Volume X, Chapter 2, “Supplemental Material on the Diversion”) who either did or did not (more conflicting testimony) arrive on the northern Costa Rican border to burn the bodies of the crew of the unmarked DC-3 that at the time it crashed appeared to be registered to the airline that was or was not ninety-nine percent owned by the former Sky West flight attendant who did or did not live on St. Lucia.

There is of course newspaper coverage, much of it less than fruitful: although a comprehensive database search on McMahon, Elena will yield, for the year in question, upwards of six hundred references in almost as many newspapers, all but a handful of them lead to the same two AP stories.

History’s rough draft.

We used to say.

When we still believed that history merited a second look.

Not that this was a situation about which many people would have been willing to talk for attribution, or even on background. As someone who quite accidentally happened to be present at the embassy in question at the time in question, I myself refused a dozen or so press requests for interviews. At the time, I chose to believe that I refused such requests because they seemed to impinge on what was then my own rather delicate project, a preliminary profile of Treat Morrison for The New York Times Magazine, to be followed, if this exploratory drilling went as hoped, by a full-scale study of his proconsular role through six administrations, but it was a little more than that.

I refused such requests because I did not want to be drawn into discussion of whatever elements seemed questionable, whatever details seemed not to be trusted, whatever logical connections seemed to be missing between the Elena Janklow I had known in California (Catherine Janklow’s mother, Wynn Janklow’s wife, co-chair, committee member, arranger of centerpieces and table favors for a full calendar of benefit lunches and dinners and performances and fashion shows, originator in fact of the locally famous No Ball Ball, enabling the benevolent to send in their checks and stay home) and the Elena McMahon in the two AP stories.

I could find no reasonable excuse not to participate in the subsequent study in crisis management undertaken by the Rand Corporation on behalf of DOD/State, but I was careful: I adopted the vernacular of such studies. I talked about “conflict resolution.” I talked about “incident prevention.” I did provide facts, more facts even than I was asked to provide, but facts of such stupefying detail and doubtful relevance that none of the several Rand analysts engaged in the project thought to ask the one question I did not want to answer.

The question of course was what did I think had happened.

I thought she got caught in the pipeline, swept into the conduits.

I thought the water was over her head.

I thought she realized what she had been set up to do only in however many elongated seconds there were between the time she registered the presence of the man on the bluff and the time it happened.

I still think this.

I say so now only because real questions have occurred to me.

About the events in question.

At the embassy in question.

At the time in question.

You may recall the rhetoric of the time in question.

This wasn’t a situation that lent itself to an MBA analysis.

This wasn’t a zero-sum deal.

In a perfect world we might have perfect choices, in the real world we had real choices, and we made them, and we measured the losses against what might have been the gains.

Real world.

There was no doubt certain things happened we might have wished hadn’t happened.

There was no doubt we were dealing with forces that might or might not include unpredictable elements.

Elements beyond our control.

No doubt, no argument at all.

And yet.

Still.

Consider the alternatives: trying to create a context for democracy and maybe getting your hands a little dirty in the process or just opting out, letting the other guy call it.

Add it up.

I did that.

I added it up.

Not zero-sum at all.

You could call this a reconstruction. A corrective, if you will, to the Rand study. A revisionist view of a time and a place and an incident about which, ultimately, most people preferred not to know. Real world.

4

If I could believe (as convention tells us) that character is destiny and the past prologue et cetera, I might begin the story of what happened to Elena McMahon during the summer of 1984 at some earlier point. I might begin it in, say, 1964, the year during which Elena McMahon lost her scholarship to the University of Nevada and within a week invented herself as a reporter for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I might begin it four years later, in 1968, the year during which, in the course of researching a backgrounder on the development of the oil business in southern California, Elena McMahon met Wynn Janklow in his father’s office on Wilshire Boulevard and, with such single-minded efficiency that she never bothered to write the piece, reinvented herself as his wife.

Crucible events.

Revelations of character.

Absolutely, no question, but the character they reveal is that of a survivor.

Since what happened to Elena McMahon during the summer of 1984 had notably little to do with surviving, let me begin where she would begin.

The night she walked off the 1984 campaign.

You will notice that participants in disasters typically locate the “beginning” of the disaster at a point suggesting their own control over events. A plane crash retold will begin not with the pressure system over the Central Pacific that caused the instability over the Gulf that caused the wind shear at DFW but at some manageable human intersect, with for example the “funny feeling” ignored at breakfast. An account of a 6.8 earthquake will begin not at the overlap of the tectonic plates but more comfortably, at the place in London where we ordered the Spode that shattered the morning the tectonic plates shifted.

Had we just gone with the funny feeling. Had we just never ordered the Spode.

We all prefer the magical explanation.

So it was with Elena McMahon.

She had walked off the campaign the day before the California primary at one-forty in the morning Los Angeles time, she repeatedly told the DIA agent Treat Morrison flew down to take her statement, as if the exact time at which she walked off the campaign had set into inexorable motion the sequence of events that followed.

At the time she walked off the campaign she had not seen her father in some months, she told the DIA agent when he pressed her on this point.

How many months exactly, the agent had said.

I don’t know exactly, she had said.

Two points. One, Elena McMahon did know exactly how many months it had been since she had last seen her father. Two, the exact number of months between the time Elena McMahon had last seen her father and the time Elena McMahon walked off the campaign was, like the exact time at which she walked off the campaign, not significant. For the record: at the time Elena McMahon walked off the 1984 campaign she had not seen her father in twenty-one months. The last time she had seen him was September 1982, either the fourteenth or the fifteenth. She could date this almost exactly because it had been either the day or the day after Bashir Gemayel was assassinated in Lebanon and at the moment the phone rang she had been sitting at her desk doing White House reaction.

In fact she could date it not almost exactly but exactly.

It had been the fifteenth. September 15 1982.

She knew it had been the fifteenth because she had arrived in Washington on the fifteenth of August and given herself a month to find a house and put Catherine into school and get the raise that meant she was no longer a provisional hire (there again a survivor, there again that single-minded efficiency), and at the moment her father called she had just made a note to ask about the raise.

Hey, her father had said when she picked up the telephone. This was his standard way of initiating telephone contact, no name, no greeting, just Hey, then silence. She had outwaited the silence. I’m passing through Washington, he had said then, maybe you could meet me the next half hour or so.

I’m at work, she had said.

Some kind of coincidence, he had said, since that’s where I called you.

Because she was on deadline she had told him to meet her across the street at the Madison. This had seemed a convenient neutral venue but as soon as she walked in and saw him sitting alone in the bar, drumming his fingers insistently on the small table, she knew that the Madison had not been a propitious choice. His eyes were narrowed, fixed on three men in apparently identical pin-striped suits at the next table. She recognized one of the three as White House, his name was Christopher Hormel, he was OMB but for whatever reason he had been hovering officiously around the podium during the noon briefing on Lebanon. That’s not policy, that’s politesse, Christopher Hormel was saying as she sat down, and then he repeated it, as if he had coined a witticism.

Just keep on shoveling it, her father had said.

Christopher Hormel had pushed back his chair and turned.

Spit it out, buddy, what’s your problem, her father had said.

Daddy, she had said, an entreaty.

I have no problem, Christopher Hormel had said, and turned away.

Faggots, her father had said, his fingers roaming the little dish of nuts and toasted cereal for the remaining macadamia nut.

Actually you’re wrong, she had said.

I see you’re buying right into the package here, her father had said. You’re very adaptable, anybody ever mention that?

She had ordered him a bourbon and water.

Say Early Times, he had corrected her. You say bourbon in these faggot bars they give you the Sweet Turkey shit or whatever it’s called, then charge extra. And hey, you, pal, crack out the almonds, save the Cheerios for the queers.

When the drink came he had drained it, then hunched forward. He had a small deal going in Alexandria, he had said. He had a source for two or three hundred nines, Intratecs, lame little suckers he could pick up at seventy-five per and pass on for close to three hundred, the guy he passed them to would double his money on the street but let him, that was street, he didn’t do street, never had, never would.

Wouldn’t need to either.

Because things were hotting up again.

Whole lot of popping going on again.

She had signed the bill.

Hey, Ellie, give us a smile, whole lot of popping.

The next time she saw him was the day she walked off the 1984 campaign.

5

She had not planned to walk off the campaign. She had picked up the plane that morning at Newark and except for the Coke during refueling at Kansas City she had not eaten in twenty-eight hours but she had not once thought of walking away, not on the plane, not at the rally in South Central, not at the meet-and-greet at the Maravilla project, not sitting on the sidewalk in Beverly Hills waiting for the pool report on the celebrity fund-raiser (the celebrity fund-raiser at which most of the guests had turned out to be people she had known in her previous life as Elena Janklow, the celebrity fund-raiser at which in the natural course of her previous life as Elena Janklow she would have been standing under the Regal Rents party tent listening to the candidate and calculating the length of time before she could say good night and drive home to the house on the Pacific Coast Highway and sit on the deck and smoke a cigarette), not even then had she framed the thought I could walk off this campaign.

She had performed that day as usual.

She had filed twice.

She had filed first from the Evergreen operations office in Kansas City and she had filed the update during downtime at the Holiday Inn in Torrance. She had received and answered three queries from the desk about why she had elected not to go with a story the wires were moving about an internal poll suggesting shifts among most-likely-voters. Re your query on last night’s Sawyer-Miller poll, she had typed in response to the most recent query. For third time, still consider sample too small to be significant. She had improved the hour spent sitting on the sidewalk waiting for the pool report on the celebrity fund-raiser by roughing in a draft for the Sunday analysis.

She had set aside the seductive familiarity of the celebrity fund-raiser.

The smell of jasmine.

The pool of blue jacaranda petals on the sidewalk where she sat.

The sense that under that tent nothing bad was going to happen and its corollary, the sense that under that tent nothing at all was going to happen.

That had been her old life and this was her new life and it was imperative that she keep focus.

She had kept focus.

She had maintained momentum.

It would seem to her later that nothing about the day had gone remarkably wrong but it would also seem that nothing about the day had gone remarkably right: for example, her name had been left off the manifest at Newark. There was a new Secret Service rotation and she had packed her press tags and the agent in charge had not wanted to let her on the plane. Where’s the dog, the agent had said repeatedly to no one in particular. The Port Authority was supposed to have a dog here, where’s the dog.

It had been seven in the morning and already hot and they had been standing on the tarmac with the piles of luggage and camera equipment. I talked to Chicago last night, she had said, trying to get the agent to look at her as she groped through her bag trying to find the tags. This was true. She had talked to Chicago the night before and she had also talked to Catherine the night before. Who she had not talked to the night before was her father. Her father had left two messages on her machine in Georgetown but she had not returned the calls. Hey, her father had said the first time he called. Then the breathing, then the click. She located something smooth and hard in her bag and thought she had the tags but it was a tin of aspirin.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t, Catherine had said to her.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line, her father had said to her machine the second time he called.

Chicago said I was on the plane, she had said to the agent.

We don’t have a dog, it’ll take all day to sweep this shit, the agent had said. He seemed to be directing this to a sound tech who squatted on the tarmac rummaging through his equipment.

She had touched the agent’s sleeve in an effort to get him to look at her. If somebody would just check with Chicago, she had said.

The agent had retracted his arm abruptly but still had not looked at her.

Who is she, he had said. She hasn’t been cleared by the campaign, what’s she doing here.

The sound tech had not looked up.

Tell him you know me, she had said to the sound tech. She could not think whose tech he was but she knew that she had seen him on the plane. What she had come during the campaign to describe as her advanced age (since no one ever demurred this had become by June an embarrassing reflex, a tic that made her face flush even as she said it) made asking for help obscurely humiliating but that was not important. What was important was getting on the plane. If she was not on the plane she would not be on the campaign. The campaign had momentum, the campaign had a schedule. The schedule would automatically take her to July, August, the frigid domes with the confetti falling and the balloons floating free.

She would work out the business about Catherine later.

She could handle Catherine.

She would call her father later.

Tell him you know me, she repeated to the sound tech’s back.

The sound tech extracted a mult cable from his equipment bag, straightened up and gazed at her, squinting. Then he shrugged and walked away.

I’m always on the plane, I’ve been on the plane since New Hampshire, she said to the agent, and then amended it: I mean on and off the plane. She could hear the note of pleading in her voice. She remembered: the tech was ABC. During Illinois she had been standing on the edge of a satellite feed and he had knocked her down pushing to get in close.

Tough titty, cunt, I’m working, he had said when she objected.

She watched him bound up the steps, two at a time, and disappear into the DC-9. The bruise where he had pushed her was still discolored two months later. She could feel sweat running down beneath her gabardine jacket and it occurred to her that if he had passed her on the way to the steps she would have tripped him. She had worn the gabardine jacket because California was always cold. If she did not find the tags she would not even get to California. The ABC tech would get to California but she would not. Tough titty, cunt, I’m working. She began to unpack her bag on the tarmac, laying out first tapes and notebooks and then an unopened package of panty hose, evidence of her sincerity, hostages to her insistence that the tags existed.

I just didn’t happen to be on the plane this week, she said to the agent. And you just came on. Which is why you don’t know me.

The agent adjusted his jacket so that she could see his shoulder holster.

She tried again: I had something personal, so I wasn’t on the plane this week, otherwise you would know me.

This too was humiliating.

Why she had not been on the plane this week was none of the agent’s business.

I had a family emergency, she heard herself add.

The agent turned away.

Wait, she said. She had located the tags in a pocket of her cosmetics bag and scrambled to catch up with the agent, leaving her tapes and notebooks and panty hose exposed on the tarmac as she offered up the metal chain, the bright oblongs of laminated plastic. The agent examined the tags and tossed them back to her, his eyes opaque. By the time she was finally allowed on the plane the camera crews had divided up the day’s box lunches (there was only the roast beef left from yesterday and the vegetarian, the Knight-Ridder reporter sitting next to her said, but she hadn’t missed shit because the vegetarian was just yesterday’s roast beef without the roast beef) and the aisle was already slippery from the food fight and somebody had rigged the PA system to play rap tapes and in the process disconnected the galley refrigerator. Which was why, when she walked off the campaign at one-forty the next morning in the lobby of the Hyatt Wilshire in Los Angeles, she had not eaten, except for the Coke during refueling at Kansas City and the garnish of wilted alfalfa sprouts the Knight-Ridder reporter had declined to eat, in twenty-eight hours.

Later she would stress that part.

Later when she called the desk from LAX she would stress the part about not having eaten in twenty-eight hours.

She would leave out the part about her father.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

She would leave out the part about Catherine.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

She would leave out her father and she would leave out Catherine and she would also leave out the smell of jasmine and the pool of blue jacaranda petals on the sidewalk outside the celebrity fund-raiser.

Small public company going nowhere, bought it as a tax shelter, knew nothing about the oil business, she had written in her notebook on the day in 1968 when she interviewed Wynn Janklow’s father. I remember I said I wanted to take a look at our oil wells, I remember I stopped at a drugstore to buy film for my camera, little Brownie I had, I’d never seen an oil well before and I wanted to take a picture. And so we drove down to Dominguez Hills there and took a few pictures. At that point in time we were taking out oil sands from twelve to fourteen thousand feet, not enough to reveal viscosity. And today the city of Los Angeles is one of the great oil-producing areas in the world, seventeen producing fields within the city limits. Fox, Hillcrest, Pico near Doheny, Cedars, United Artists, UCLA, five hundred miles of pipeline under the city, the opposition to drilling isn’t rational, it’s psychiatric, whole time my son was playing ball at Beverly Hills High School there I was taking out oil from a site just off third base, he used to take girls out there, show them my rockers.

The old man had looked up when the son entered the office.

Just ask him if he didn’t, the old man said.

Beverly Hills crude, the son said, and she married him.

Pick yourself up.

Brush yourself off.

I hadn’t eaten in twenty-eight hours, she would say to the desk.

Not that it mattered to the desk.

6

On the plane to Miami that morning she had experienced a brief panic, a sense of being stalled, becalmed, like the first few steps off a moving sidewalk. Off the campaign she would get no overnight numbers. Off the campaign she would get no spin, no counterspin, no rumors, no denials. The campaign would be en route to San Jose and her seat on the DC-9 would be empty and she was sitting by herself in this seat she had paid for herself on this Delta flight to Miami. The campaign would move on to Sacramento at noon and San Diego at one and back to Los Angeles at two and she would still be sitting in this seat she had paid for herself on this Delta flight to Miami.

This was just downtime, she told herself. This was just an overdue break. She had been pushing herself too hard, juggling too many balls, so immersed in the story she was blind to the story.

This could even be an alternate way into the story.

In the flush of this soothing interpretation she ordered a vodka and orange juice and fell asleep before it came. When she woke over what must have been Texas she could not at first remember why she was on this sedative but unfamiliar plane. RON Press Overnites at Hyatt Wilshire, the Los Angeles schedule had said, and the bus had finally arrived at the Hyatt Wilshire and the press arrangements had been made out of Chicago but her name was not on the list and there was no room.

Chicago fucked up, what else is new, the traveling press secretary had shrugged. So find somebody, double up, wheels up at six sharp.

She recalled a fatigue near vertigo. She recalled standing at the desk for what seemed a long time watching the apparently tireless children with whom she had crossed the country drift toward the bar and the elevator. She recalled picking up her bag and her computer case and walking out into the cold California night in her gabardine jacket and asking the doorman if he could get her a taxi to LAX. She had not called the desk until she had the boarding pass for Miami.

7

When she arrived at the house in Sweetwater at five-thirty that afternoon the screen door was unlatched and the television was on and her father was asleep in a chair, the remote clutched in his hand, a half-finished drink and a can of jalapeño bean dip at his elbow. She had never before seen this house but it was indistinguishable from the house in Hialeah and before that the unit in Opa-Locka and for that matter the place between Houston and NASA. They were just places he rented and they all looked alike. The house in Vegas had looked different. Her mother had still been living with him when they had the house in Vegas.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

She would deal with that later.

She had dealt with the plane and she would deal with that.

She sat on a stool at the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen and began reading the Miami Herald she had picked up at the airport, very methodically, every page in order, column one to column eight, never turning ahead to the break, only occasionally glancing at the television screen. The Knight-Ridder reporter who had been sitting next to her on the plane the day before appeared to have based his file entirely on the most-likely-voters story the wires had moved. California political insiders are predicting a dramatic last-minute shift in primary voting patterns here, his story began, misleadingly. An American hostage who had walked out of Lebanon via Damascus said at his press conference in Wiesbaden that during captivity he had lost faith not only in the teachings of his church but in God. Hostage Describes Test of Faith, the headline read, again misleadingly. She considered ways in which the headline could have been made accurate (Hostage Describes Loss of Faith? Hostage Fails Test of Faith?), then put down the Herald and studied her father. He had gotten old. She had called him at Christmas and she had talked to him from Laguna last week but she had not seen him and at some point in between he had gotten old.

She was going to have to tell him again about her mother.

Pardon my using your time but I’ve been trying to call your mother and that asshole she lives with refuses to put her on the line.

She had told him on the telephone from Laguna but it had not gotten through, she was going to have to tell him again, he would want to talk about it.

It occurred to her suddenly that this was why she was here.

She had arrived at LAX with every intention of returning to Washington and had heard herself asking instead for a flight to Miami.

She had asked for a flight to Miami because she was going to have to tell him again about her mother.

That her mother had died was not going to change the course of his days but it would be a subject, it was something they would need to get through.

They would not need to talk about Catherine. Or rather: he would ask how Catherine was and she would say fine and then he would ask if Catherine liked school and she would say yes.

She should call Catherine. She should let Catherine know where she was.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

She would call Catherine later. She would call Catherine the next day.

Her father snored, a ragged apnea snore, and the remote dropped from his hand. On the television screen the graphic Broward Closeup appeared, over film of what seemed to be a mosque in Pompano Beach. It developed that discussion of politics had been forbidden at this mosque because many of what the reporter called Pompano Muslims came from countries at war with one another. “In Broward County at least,” the reporter concluded, “Muslims who have known only war can now find peace.”

This too was misleading. It occurred to her that possibly what was misleading was the concept of “news” itself, a liberating thought. She picked up the remote and pressed the mute.

“Goddamn ragheads,” her father said, but did not open his eyes.

“Daddy,” she said tentatively.

“Goddamn ragheads deserve to get nuked.” He opened his eyes. “Kitty. Don’t. Jesus Christ. Don’t do that.”

“It’s not Kitty,” she said. “It’s her daughter. Your daughter.”

She did not know how long she had been crying but when she groped in her bag for a tissue she found only damp wads.

“It’s Elena,” she said finally. “It’s me.”

“Ellie,” her father said. “What the hell.”

That would be one place to begin this story.

Elena McMahon’s father getting involved with the people who wanted to make the deal with Fidel to take back the Sans Souci would have been another.

Way back. Much earlier. Call that back story.

This would have been another place to begin, also back story, just an image: a single-engine Cessna flying low, dropping a roll of toilet paper over a mangrove clearing, the paper streaming and looping as it catches on the treetops, the Cessna gaining altitude as it banks to retrace its flight path. A man, Elena McMahon’s father, the man in the house in Sweetwater but much younger, retrieves the cardboard roll, its ends closed with masking tape. He cuts the masking tape with an army knife. He takes out a piece of paper. Suspend all activity, the paper reads. Report without delay.

November 22 1963.

Dick McMahon’s footnote to history.

Treat Morrison was in Indonesia the day that roll of toilet paper drifted down over the Keys.

On special assignment at the consulate in Surabaya.

They locked the consulate doors and did not open them for three days.

Treat Morrison’s own footnote to history.

8

I still believe in history.

Let me amend that.

I still believe in history to the extent that I believe history to be made exclusively and at random by people like Dick McMahon. There are still more people like Dick McMahon around than you might think, most of them old but still doing a little business, keeping a hand in, an oar in the water, the wolf from the door. They can still line up some jeeps in Shreveport, they can still lay hands on some slots in Beaumont, they can still handle the midnight call from the fellow who needs a couple or three hundred Savage automatic rifles with telescopic sights. They may not remember all the names they used but they remember the names they did not use. They may have trouble sorting out the details of all they knew but they remember having known it.

They remember they ran some moves.

They remember they had personal knowledge of certain actions.

They remember they knew Carlos Prío, they remember they heard certain theories about his suicide. They remember they knew Johnny Roselli, they remember they heard certain theories about how he turned up in the oil drum in Biscayne Bay. They remember many situations in which certain fellows show up in the middle of the night asking for something and a couple or three days later these same identical fellows turn up in San Pedro Sula or Santo Domingo or Panama right in the goddamn thick of it.

Christ if I had a dollar for every time somebody came to me and said he was thinking about doing a move I’d be a rich man today, Elena McMahon’s father said the day she was going down to where he berthed the Kitty Rex.

For the first two weeks at the house in Sweetwater she conserved energy by not noticing anything. That was how she put it to herself, she was conserving energy, as if attention were a fossil fuel. She drove out to Key Biscayne and let her mind go fallow, absorbing only the bleached flatness of the place, the pale aquamarine water and the gray sky and the drifts of white coral sand and the skeletons of live oak and oleander broken when the storms rolled in. One day when it rained and the wind was blowing she walked across the lowest of the causeways, overcome by a need to feel the water lapping over her sandals. By then she had already shed her clothes, pared down to essentials, concentrated her needs, wrapped up her gabardine jacket and unopened packages of panty hose and dropped them, a tacit farewell to the distractions of the temperate zone, in a Goodwill box on Eighth Street.

There’s some question here what you’re doing, the desk had said when she called to say she was in Miami. Siegel’s been covering for you, but you understand we’ll need to move someone onto this on a through-November basis.

That would be fair, she had said.

She had not yet conserved enough energy to resume thinking on a through-November basis.

At a point late each day she would focus on finding something that her father would eat, something he would not immediately set aside in favor of another drink, and she would go downtown to a place she remembered he liked and ask for containers of black beans or shrimp in garlic sauce she could reheat later.

From the Floridita, she would say when her father looked without interest at his plate.

In Havana, he would say, doubtful.

The one here, she would say. The Floridita on Flagler Street. You used to take me there.

The Floridita your mother and I knew was in Havana, he would say.

Which would lead as if on replay to his telling her again about the night at the Floridita in he believed 1958 with her mother and Carlos Prío and Fidel and one of the Murchisons. The Floridita in Havana, he would specify each time. Havana was the Floridita your mother and I knew, goddamn but we had some fun there, just ask your mother, she’ll tell you.

Which would lead in the same replay mode to her telling him again that her mother was dead. On each retelling he would seem to take it in. Goddamn, he would say. Kitty’s gone. He would make her repeat certain details, as if to fix the flickering fact of it.

She had not known how sick Kitty was, no.

She had not seen Kitty before she died, no.

There had been no funeral, no.

Kitty had been cremated, yes.

Kitty’s last husband was named Ward, yes.

It was true that Ward used to sell pharmaceuticals, yes, but no, she would not describe it as dealing dope and no, she did not think there had been any funny business. In any case Ward was beside the point, which was this: her mother was dead.

Her father’s eyes would go red then, and he would turn away.

Pretty Kitty, he would say as if to himself. Kit-Cat.

Half an hour later he would again complain that he had tried to call Kitty a night or two before and the asshole dope dealer she lived with had refused to put her on the line.

Because he couldn’t, Elena would say again. Because she’s dead.

Sometimes when the telephone rang in the middle of the night she would wake, and hear the front door close and a car engine turning over, her father’s ’72 Cadillac Seville convertible, parked on the spiky grass outside the room in which she slept. The headlights would sweep the ceiling of the room as he backed out onto the street. Most nights she would get up and open a bottle of beer and sit in bed drinking it until she fell asleep again, but one night the beer did not work and she was still awake, standing barefoot in the kitchen watching a local telethon on which a West Palm Beach resident in a sequined dress seemed to be singing gospel, when her father came in at dawn.

What the hell, her father said.

I said to Satan get thee behind me, the woman in the sequined dress was singing on the television screen.

You shouldn’t be driving, Elena said.

Victory today is mine.

Right, I should take out my teeth and go to the nursing home, he said. Jesus Christ, you want to kill me too?

The woman in the sequined dress snapped her mike cord as she segued into “After You’ve Been There Ten Thousand Years,” and Dick McMahon transferred his flickering rage to the television screen. I been there ten thousand years I still won’t want to see you, honey, he shouted at the woman in the sequined dress. Because honey you are worthless, you are worse than worthless, you are trash. By the time he refocused on Elena he had softened, or forgotten. How about a drink, he said.

She got him a drink.

If you have any interest in what I’m doing, he said as she sat down at the table across from him, all I can say is it’s major.

She said nothing. She had trained herself since childhood not to have any interest in what her father was doing. This had been difficult only when she had to fill out a form that asked for Father’s Occupation. He did deals. Does deals? No. She had usually settled on Investor. If it came up in conversation she would say that her father bought and sold things, leaving open the possibility, in those parts of the country where she had lived until 1982, raw sunbelt cities riding high on land trades, that what he bought and sold was real estate. She had lost her scholarship at the University of Nevada because the administration had changed the basis for granting aid from merit to need and she had recognized that it would be a waste of time to ask her father to fill out a financial report.

Right from the top, he said. Top shelf.

She said nothing.

This one turns out the way it’s supposed to turn out, he said, I’ll be in a position to deal myself out, fold my hand, take the Kitty Rex down past Largo and stay there. Some life. Catching fish and bumming around the shallows. Not my original idea of a good time but it beats sitting here getting old.

Who exactly is running this one, she said carefully.

What do you care, he said, suddenly wary. What did you ever care who was running any of them.

I mean, she said, how did whoever is running this one happen to decide to work through you.

Why wouldn’t they work through me, he said. I still got my teeth. I’m not in the nursing home yet. No thanks to you.

Dick McMahon had closed his eyes, truculent, and had not woken until she took the glass from his hand and put a cotton blanket over his legs.

What do you hear from your mother, he had said then.

9

That was the morning, June 15, a Friday, when she should have known it was time to cut and run.

She knew how to cut and run.

She had done it often enough.

Cut and run, cut her losses, just walked away.

She had just walked away from her mother for example.

See where it got her.

She had flown to Laguna as soon as she got the call but there had been no funeral. Her connection into John Wayne was delayed and by the time she arrived in the cold May twilight her mother had already been cremated. You know how Kitty felt about funerals, Ward said repeatedly. Actually I never heard her mention funerals, Elena said finally, thinking only to hear more about what her mother had said or thought, but Ward had looked at her as if wounded. She was welcome, he said, to do what she wanted with the cremains, the remains, the ashes or whatever, the cremains was what they called them, but in case she had nothing specific in mind he had already arranged with the Neptune Society. You know how Kitty felt about open ocean, he said. Open ocean was something else Elena did not recall her mother mentioning. So if it’s all the same to you, Ward said, visibly relieved by her silence, I’ll go ahead with the arrangements as planned.

She found herself wondering how short a time she could reasonably stay.

There would be nothing out of John Wayne but she could get a redeye out of LAX.

Straight shot up the 405.

Ward’s daughter Belinda was in the bedroom, packing what she called the belongings. The belongings would go to the hospice thrift shop, Belinda said, but she knew that Kitty would want Elena to take what she wanted. Elena opened a drawer, aware of Belinda watching her.

Kitty never got tired of mentioning you, Belinda said. I’d be over here dealing with the Medicare forms or some other little detail and she’d find a way to mention you. It might be you’d just called from wherever.

The drawer seemed to be filled with turbans, snoods, shapeless head coverings of a kind Elena could not associate with her mother.

Or, Belinda said, it might be that you hadn’t. I got her those for the chemo.

Elena closed the drawer.

Moved by the dim wish to preserve something of her mother from consignment to the hospice thrift shop she tried to remember objects in which her mother had set special stock, but in the end took only an ivory bracelet she remembered her mother wearing and a creased snapshot, retrieved from a carton grease-penciled OUT, of her mother and father seated in folding metal lawn chairs on either side of a portable barbecue outside the house in Las Vegas. Before she left she stood in the kitchen watching Ward demonstrate his ability to microwave one of the several dozen individual casseroles stacked in the freezer. Your mother did those just before she went down, Belinda said, raising her voice over Jeopardy. Kitty would have aced that, Ward said when a contestant on-screen missed a question in the Famous Travelers category. See what he does, Belinda said as if Ward could not hear. He keeps working in Kitty’s name, same way Kitty used to work in yours. Two hours later Elena had been at LAX, trying to get cash from an ATM and unable to remember either her bank code or her mother’s maiden name.

It might be you’d just called from wherever.

In the deep nowhere safety of the United lounge she drank two glasses of water and tried to remember her calling card number.

Or it might be that you hadn’t.

Thirty-six hours after that she had been on the tarmac at Newark with the agent saying where’s the dog, we don’t have a dog, it’ll take all day to sweep this shit.

She had cut and run from that too.

No more schedules, no more confetti, no more balloons floating free.

She had walked away from that the way she had walked away from the house on the Pacific Coast Highway. She did not think Wynn, she thought the house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

Tile floors, white walls, tennis lunches on Sunday afternoons.

Men with even tans and recent manicures, women with killer serves and bodies minutely tuned against stretch marks; always an actor or two or three, often a player just off the circuit. The beauty part is, the Justice Department still gets its same take, Wynn would be saying on the telephone, and then, his hand over the receiver, Tell whoever you got in the kitchen it’s time to lay on the lunch. Nothing about those Sunday afternoons would have changed except this: Wynn’s office, not Elena, would now call the caterer who laid on the lunch.

The big Stellas would still flank the door.

Wynn would still wake at night when the tide reached ebb and the sea went silent.

Goddamn what’s the matter out there.

Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda, blue so intense you could drown in it.

We had a real life and now we don’t and just because I’m your daughter I’m supposed to like it and I don’t.

What exactly did you have in Malibu you don’t have now, she had asked Catherine, and Catherine had walked right into it, Catherine had never even seen it coming. You could open the door in Malibu and be at the beach, Catherine said. Or the Jacuzzi. Or the pool.

Anything else, she had asked Catherine, her voice neutral.

The tennis court.

Is that all.

The three cars, Catherine said after a silence. We had three cars.

A Jacuzzi, she had said to Catherine. A pool. A tennis court. Three cars. Is that your idea of a real life?

Catherine, humiliated, outmaneuvered, had slammed down the phone.

Smell of jasmine, pool of jacaranda.

An equally indefensible idea of a real life.

She had been thinking that over when Catherine called back.

I had my father thank you very much.

She was even about to just walk away from Catherine.

She knew she was. She knew the signs. She was losing focus on Catherine. She was losing momentum on Catherine. If she could even consider walking away from Catherine she could certainly walk away from this house in Sweetwater. That she did not was the beginning of the story as some people in Miami came to see it.

10

“I have frequently stated that I did not intend to set down either autobiographical notes of any kind or any version of events as I have witnessed and affected them. It has been my firm and long-held conviction that events, for better or for worse, speak for themselves, work as it were toward their own ends. After reviewing published accounts of certain of these events, however, I find my own role in them to have been misrepresented. Therefore, on this August Sunday morning, with a tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia, I have determined to set forth as concisely as possible, and in as much detail as is consistent with national security, certain actions I took in 1984 in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.”

So begins the four-hundred-and-seventy-six-page transcript of the taped statement that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library at Berkeley with instructions that it be sealed to scholars until five years after his death.

Those five years have now passed.

As have, and this would have been his calculation, any lingering spasms of interest in the matter of what later became known as the lethal, as opposed to the humanitarian, resupply.

Or so it would seem.

Since, seven years after Treat Morrison’s death and two years after the unsealing of the transcript, I remain the single person to have asked to see it.

MORRISON, TREAT AUSTIN, ambassador-at-large; b. San Francisco Mar. 3, 1930; s. Francis J. and Margaret (Austin) M; B.A., U. of Calif. at Berkeley, 1951; grad. National War College 1956; m. Diane Waring, Dec. 5, 1953 (dec. 1983). Commissioned 2nd lt. U.S. Army 1951, served in Korea, Germany, mil. attaché Chile 1953-54; spec, asst to commander SHAPE Paris 1955; attaché to US Mission to E.C. Brussels 1956-57

So Treat Morrison’s Who’s Who entry began.

And continued.

All the special postings enumerated, all the private-sector sojourns specified.

All there.

Right down to Office: Dept. of State, 2201 C St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20520.

Without giving the slightest sense of what Treat Morrison actually did.

Which was fix things.

What was remarkable about those four hundred and seventy-six pages that Treat Morrison committed to the Bancroft Library was, as in his Who’s Who entry, less what was said than what was not said. What was said was predictable enough, globalism versus regionalism, full Boland, failed nations, correct interventions, multilateral approach, Directive 25, Resolution 427, criteria not followed, nothing Treat Morrison could not have said at the Council on Foreign Relations, nothing he had not said, up there in the paneled room with the portrait of David Rockefeller and the old guys nodding off and the young guys asking pinched textbook questions and the willowy young women who worked on the staff standing in the back of the room like geishas, shuttle up and hop a flight back down with one of the corporate guys, maybe learn something for a change, you’d be surprised, they’ve got their own projections, their own risk analysts, no bureaucracy, no commitments to stale ideologies, none of those pinched textbook questions, they can afford to keep out there ahead of the power curve, corporate guys are light-years ahead of us.

Sometimes.

Four hundred and seventy-six pages on correct interventions and no clue that a correct intervention was for Treat Morrison an intervention in which when you run out of options you can still get your people to the airport.

Four hundred and seventy-six pages with only a veiled suggestion of Treat Morrison’s rather spectacular indifference to the conventional interests and concerns of his profession, only an oblique flash of his particular maladaption, which was to be a manipulator of abstracts whose exclusive interest was in the specific. You get just the slightest hint of that maladaption in tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling, just the barest lapse before the sonorous recovery of outside these offices I am about to vacate at the Department of State in the City of Washington, District of Columbia.

No hint at all of his long half-mad gaze.

Wide spindrift gaze toward paradise, Elena McMahon said the first time she was alone with him.

He said nothing.

A poem, she said.

Still he said nothing.

Something galleons of Carib fire, she said, something something the seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

He studied her without speaking. Diane read poetry, he said then.

There had been a silence.

Diane was his wife.

Diane was dead.

Diane Morrison, 52, wife of, after a short illness, survived by, in lieu of flowers.

I wasn’t thinking about the Carib fire part, Elena had said finally.

Yes you were, Treat Morrison had said.

11

What we want here is a montage, music over. Angle on Elena. Alone on the dock where her father berthed the Kitty Rex. Working loose a splinter on the planking with the toe of her sandal. Taking off her scarf and shaking out her hair, damp from the sweet heavy air of South Florida. Cut to Barry Sedlow. Standing in the door of the frame shack, under the sign that read RENTALS GAS BAIT BEER AMMO. Leaning against the counter. Watching Elena through the screen door as he waited for change. Angle on the manager. Sliding a thousand-dollar bill beneath the tray in the cash register, replacing the tray, counting out the hundreds.

No place you could not pass a hundred.

There in the sweet heavy air of South Florida.

Havana so close you could see the two-tone Impalas on the Malecón.

Goddamn but we had some fun there.

The music would give you the sweet heavy air, the music would give you Havana.

Imagine what the music was as: Barry Sedlow folded the bills into his money clip without looking at them, kicked open the screen door, and walked down the dock, a little something in the walk, a definite projection of what a woman less wary than Elena might (might, could, would, did, wanted to, needed to) mistake for sex.

Close on Elena. Watching Barry Sedlow.

“Looks like you’re waiting for somebody,” Barry Sedlow said.

“I think you,” Elena McMahon said.

Her father had begun to run the fever during the evening of Saturday the sixteenth of June. She had known something was wrong because the drink he had made at seven remained untouched at ten, its color mottled by melted ice.

“I don’t know what that foul ball expected to get out of showing up here,” he said about midnight.

“What foul ball,” she said.

“What’s his name, Epperson, Max Epperson, the guy you were cozying up with tonight.”

She said nothing.

“Come on,” he said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“I don’t remember seeing anyone but you tonight,” she said finally.

“Epperson. Not the guy with the mickey-mouse vest. The other one.”

She had framed her response carefully. “I guess neither of them made an impression on me.”

“Epperson made an impression on you all right.”

She had thought this over. “Listen to me,” she had said then. “No one was here.”

“Have it your way,” he said.

She had driven to an all-night drugstore to buy a thermometer. His temperature, when she managed to take it, was 102. By morning it was 103.2, and she took him to the emergency room at Jackson Memorial. It was not the nearest hospital but it was the one she knew, a director she and Wynn knew had been shooting there, Catherine had been on spring vacation and they had taken her to visit the location. Nothing straight bourbon won’t fix, her father said in the emergency room when the triage nurse asked what was wrong with him. By noon he had been admitted and she had signed the forms and heard the difference between Medicare A and B and when she got back upstairs to the room he had already tried to yank out the IV line and there was blood all over the sheets and he was crying.

“Get me out of here,” he said. “Goddamnit get me out of here.”

The IV nurse was on another floor and by the time she got back and got the line running again the nurse with the narcotics keys was on another floor and it was close to five before they got him sedated. By dawn his temperature had dropped below 101 but he was focused exclusively on Max Epperson. Epperson was welshing on his word. Epperson had floated a figure of three dollars per for 69s and now he was claiming the market had dropped to two per. Somebody had to talk reason to Epperson, Epperson could queer the whole deal, Epperson was off the reservation, didn’t know the first thing about the business he was in.

“I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in,” she said.

“Christ, what business are they all in,” her father said.

They would need more blood work before they had a diagnosis, the resident said. The resident was wearing a pink polo shirt and kept his eyes fixed on the nurses’ station, as if to distance himself from the situation and from Elena. They would need a scan, an MRI, they would need something else she did not get the name of. They would of course order a psychiatric evaluation, although evidence of mental confusion would not in itself be a diagnostic criterion. Such mental confusion, if there was mental confusion, was incidental, a secondary complication. Whatever the diagnosis, it would not be uncommon to see a psychotic break with a fever this high in a patient this age.

“He’s not that old,” she said. This was pointlessly argumentive but she disliked the resident. “He’s seventy-four.”

“After retirement you have to expect a deficit.”

“He’s not retired either.” She could not seem to stop herself. “He’s quite active.”

The resident shrugged.

At noon a second resident arrived to do the psychiatric evaluation. He too was wearing a polo shirt, mint green, and he too avoided Elena’s eyes. She had fixed her gaze on the signs posted in the room and tried not to listen, I/O. INFECTIOUS SHARPS ONLY. “This is just a little game,” the psychiatric resident said. “Can you tell me the name of the current president of the United States.”

“Some game,” Dick McMahon said.

“Take your time,” the psychiatric resident said. “Don’t let me rush you.”

“Count on it.”

There was a silence.

“Daddy,” Elena said.

“I get the game,” Dick McMahon said. “I’m supposed to say Herbert Hoover, then he puts me away in the home.” His eyes narrowed. “All right. Wheel of Fortune. Herbert Hoover.” He paused, watching the psychiatric resident. “Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Harry S Truman. Dwight David Eisenhower. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Lyndon Baines Johnson. Richard Milhous Nixon. Gerald whatever his name was, kept tripping over his feet. Jimmy something. The Christer. Then the one now. The one the old dummy’s not meant to remember. The other old dummy. Reagan.”

“Really excellent, Mr. McMahon,” the psychiatric resident said. “You deserve first prize.”

“First prize is, you leave.” Dick McMahon turned with difficulty away from the resident and closed his eyes. When he opened them again he focused on Elena. “Funny coincidence, that asshole bringing up presidents, which brings us back to Epperson.” His voice was exhausted, matter-of-fact. “Because Epperson was involved in Dallas, that deal. I ever tell you that?”

Elena looked at him. His gaze was trusting, his pale-blue eyes rimmed with red. It had not before occurred to her that he might have known who was involved in Dallas. Neither did it surprise her. She supposed if she thought about it that he might have known who was involved in a lot of things, but it was too late now, the processor was unreliable. An exploration of what Dick McMahon knew could now yield only corrupted files, crossed data, lost clusters in which the spectral Max Epperson would materialize not only at the Texas Book Depository but in a room at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis with Sirhan Sirhan and Santos Trafficante and Fidel and one of the Murchisons.

“What deal in Dallas is that, Mr. McMahon,” the psychiatric resident said.

“Just a cattle deal he did in Texas.” Elena guided the resident to the door. “He should sleep now. He’s too tired for this.”

“Don’t tell me he’s still here,” Dick McMahon said without opening his eyes.

“He just left.” Elena sat in the chair by the hospital bed and took her father’s hand. “It’s all right. Nobody’s here.”

Several times during the next few hours her father woke and asked what time it was, what day it was, each time with an edge of panic in his voice.

He had to be somewhere.

He had some things to do, some people to see.

Some people would be waiting for him to call.

These things he had to do could not wait.

These people he had to see had to be seen now.

Late in the day the sky went dark and she opened the window to feel the air beginning to move. It was only then, while the lightning forking on the horizon and the sound of thunder created a screen, a safe zone in which things could be said that would have no consequences, that Dick McMahon began to tell Elena who it was he had to see, what it was he had to do. Tropical storm due from the southeast and hard rain already falling. That he could not do it was obvious. That she should undertake to do it for him would have been less obvious.

12

It is hard now to call up the particular luridity of 1984. I read back over the clips and want only to give you the period verbatim, the fever of it, the counterfeit machismo of it, the extent to which it was about striking and maintaining a certain kind of sentimental pose. Many people appear to have walked around the dead center of this period with parrots on their shoulders, or monkeys. Many people appear to have chosen during this period to identify themselves as something other than what they were, as “cargo specialists” or as “aircraft brokers” or as “rose importers” or, with what came to seem baffling frequency, as “Danish journalists.” This was a period during which many people appear to have known that the way to fly undetected over the Gulf coastline of the United States was low and slow, five hundred to a thousand feet, an effortless fade into the helicopter traffic off the Gulf rigs. This was a period during which many people appear to have known that the way to fly undetected over foreign coastlines was with cash, to buy a window. This was a period during which a significant minority among the population at large appears to have understood how government funds earmarked for humanitarian aid might be diverted, even as the General Accounting Office monitored the accounts, to more pressing needs.

Piece of cake, Barry Sedlow told Elena McMahon.

This was not his personal line of work but he knew guys who did it.

Pick a small retailer in any friendly, say Honduras or Costa Rica. Ask this retailer for an invoice showing a written estimate for the purchase of, say, a thousand pairs of green Lee jeans, a thousand green T-shirts, and a thousand pairs of green rubber boots. Specify that the word “estimate” not appear on the invoice. Present this invoice, bearing an estimated figure of say $25,870 but no indication that it is merely an estimate, to the agency responsible for disbursing said humanitarian aid, and ask that the $25,870 reimbursement due be transferred to your account at Citibank Panama. Instruct Citibank Panama to wire the $25,870 to one or another “broker” account, for example the account of a third-party company at the Consolidated Bank in Miami, an account the sole purpose of which is to receive the funds and make them available for whatever need presents itself.

The need, say, to make a payment to Dick McMahon.

There are people who understand this kind of transaction and there are people who do not. Those who understand it are at heart storytellers, weavers of conspiracy just to make the day come alive, and they see it in a flash, comprehend all its turns, get its possibilities. For anyone who could look at a storefront in Honduras or Costa Rica and see an opportunity to tap into the United States Treasury for $25,870, this was a period during which no information could be without interest. Every moment could be seen to connect to every other moment, every act to have logical if obscure consequences, an unbroken narrative of vivid complexity. That Elena McMahon walked into this heightened life and for a brief period lived it is what interests me about her, because she was not one of those who saw in a flash how every moment could connect.

I had thought to learn Treat Morrison’s version of why she did it from the transcript of his taped statement. I had imagined that she would have told him what she would not or did not tell either the FBI or the DIA agents who spoke to her. I had imagined that Treat Morrison would have in due time set down his conclusions about whatever it was she told him.

No hint of that in those four hundred and seventy-six pages.

Instead I learned that what he referred to as “a certain incident that occurred in 1984 in connection with one of our Caribbean embassies” should not, in his opinion, have occurred.

Should not have occurred and could not have been predicted.

By what he called “any quantitative measurement.”

However, he added. One caveat. In situ this certain incident could have been predicted.

Which went to the question, he said, of whether policy should be based on what was said or believed or wished for by people sitting in climate-controlled rooms in Washington or New York or whether policy should be based on what was seen and reported by the people who were actually on the ground. He was constrained by classification from discussing the details of this incident and mentioned it only, he said, as a relevant illustration of the desirability of listening to the people who were actually on the ground.

No comment, as the people who were actually on the ground were trained to say if asked what they were doing or where they were staying or if they wanted a drink or even what time it was.

No comment.

Thank you.

Goodbye.

Elena McMahon had not been trained to say this, but was on the ground nonetheless.

I recently sat at dinner in Washington next to a reporter who covered the ground in question during the period in question. After a few glasses of wine he turned to me, lowered his voice, and said about this experience that nothing that had happened to him since, including the birth of his children and assignment to several more overt wars in several more overt parts of the world, had made him feel so alive as waking up on that particular ground any day in that particular period.

Until Elena McMahon woke up on that particular ground, she did not count her life as one in which anything had happened.

No comment. Thank you. Goodbye.

13

The first time she met Barry Sedlow was the day her father left the hospital. You’ll be pleased to know you’ll be leaving here tomorrow, the resident had said to her father, and she had followed him out to the nurses’ station. “He’s not ready to go home,” she had said to the resident’s back.

“Not to go home, no.” The resident had not looked up from the chart he was studying. “Which is why you should be making whatever arrangements you prefer with the discharge coordinator.”

“But you just agreed with me. He’s not ready to be discharged. The arrangement I prefer is that he stay in the hospital.”

“He can’t stay in the hospital,” the resident said, implacable. “So he will be discharged. And he’s not going to be able to take care of himself.”

“Exactly. That was my point.” She tried for a reasonable tone. “As you say, he’s not going to be able to take care of himself. Which is why I think he should stay in the hospital.”

“You have the option of making an acceptable arrangement for home care with the discharge coordinator.”

“Acceptable to who?”

“To the discharge coordinator.”

“So it’s up to the discharge coordinator whether or not he stays here?”

“No, it’s up to Dr. Mertz.”

“I’ve never met Dr. Mertz.”

“Dr. Mertz is the admitting physician of record. On my recommendation, Dr. Mertz has authorized discharge.”

“Then I should talk to Dr. Mertz?”

“Dr. Mertz is not on call this week.”

She had tried another tack. “Look. If this has something to do with insurance, I signed papers saying I would be responsible. I’ll pay for whatever his insurance won’t cover.”

“You will, yes. But he still won’t stay here.”

“Why won’t he?”

“Because unless you’ve made an acceptable alternate arrangement,” the resident said, unscrewing the top from his fountain pen and wiping the nib with a tissue, “he’ll be discharged in the morning to a convalescent facility.”

“You can’t do that. I won’t take him there.”

“You won’t have to. The facility sends its van.”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant you can’t just send someone to a nursing home.”

“Yes. We can. We do it all the time. Unless of course the family has made an acceptable alternate arrangement with the discharge coordinator.”

There had been a silence. “How do I reach the discharge coordinator,” she said then.

“I could ask her to come by the patient’s room,” The resident had refitted the top of his pen and placed it in the breast pocket of his polo shirt. He seemed not to know what to do with the tissue. “When she has a moment.”

“Somebody took my goddamn shoes,” her father had said when she walked back into the room. He was sitting on the edge of the bed buckling his belt and trying to free his arm from the hospital gown. “I can’t get out of here without my goddamn shoes.” She had no way of knowing whether he intended to walk out or had merely misunderstood the resident, but she had found his shoes and his shirt and arranged his jacket over his thin shoulders, then walked him out past the nurses’ station into the elevator.

“You’ll need a nurse,” she had said tentatively when the elevator doors closed.

Her father had nodded, apparently resigned to strategic compromise.

“I’ll tell the agency we need someone right away,” she had said, trying to consolidate her gain. “Today.”

Once more her father had nodded.

Lulled by the ease of the end run around the hospital apparat, Elena was still basking in this new tractability when, a few hours later, securely back at the house in Sweetwater, the nurse installed in front of the television set and the bed freshly made and a glass of bourbon-spiked Ensure at the ready (another strategic compromise, this one with the nurse), Dick McMahon announced that he needed his car keys and he needed them now.

“I told you,” he said when she asked why. “I’ve got somebody to see. Somebody’s waiting for me.”

“I told you,” he said when she asked who. “I told you the whole deal.”

“You have to listen to me,” she had said finally. “You’re not in any condition to do anything. You’re weak. You’re still not thinking clearly. You’ll make a mistake. You’ll get hurt.”

Her father had at first said nothing, his pale eyes watery and fixed on hers.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said then. His voice was helpless, bewildered. “Goddamn, what’s going to happen now.”

“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said then, as if defeated, his head falling to one side. “I needed this deal.”

She had taken his hand.

“What’s going to happen now,” he had repeated.

“I’ll take care of it,” she had said.

Which was how Elena McMahon happened, an hour later, to be standing on the dock where the Kitty Rex was berthed. Looks like you’re waiting for somebody, Barry Sedlow said. I think you, Elena McMahon said.

The second time she was to meet Barry Sedlow he had instructed her to be in the lobby of the Omni Hotel on Biscayne Boulevard at what he called thirteen sharp. She was to sit near the entrance to the restaurant as if she were waiting to meet someone for lunch.

There would be lunch traffic in and out of the restaurant, she would not stand out.

If he happened not to show up by the time the lunch traffic thinned out she was to leave, because at that point she would stand out.

“Why might you happen not to show up,” she had asked.

Barry Sedlow had written an 800 number on the back of a card reading KROME GUN CLUB and given it to her before he answered. “Could happen I won’t like the look of it,” he had said then.

She had arrived at one. It had been raining hard all morning and there was water everywhere, water sluicing down the black tile wall behind the lobby pool, water roiling and bubbling over the underwater spots in the pool, water standing on flat roofs and puddling around vents and driving against the six-story canted window. In the chill of the air-conditioning her clothes were damp and clammy against her skin and after a while she stood up and walked around the lobby, trying to get warm. Even the music from the merry-go-round in the mall downstairs was muted, distorted, as if she were hearing it underwater. She was standing at the railing looking down at the merry-go-round when the woman spoke to her.

The woman was holding an unfolded map.

The woman did not want to bother Elena but wondered if she knew the best way to get on I-95.

Elena told her the best way to get on I-95.

At three o’clock the restaurant had emptied out and Barry Sedlow had not appeared. From a pay phone in the lobby she dialed the 800 number Barry Sedlow had given her and found that it was a beeper. She punched in the number of the pay phone in the Omni lobby but at four o’clock, when the phone had not rung, she left.

At midnight the phone rang in the house in Sweetwater.

Elena hesitated, then picked it up.

“You stood out,” Barry Sedlow said. “You let yourself be noticed.”

“Noticed by who?”

He did not respond directly. “Here’s what you’re going to want to do.”

What she was going to want to do, he said, was walk into the Pan Am Clipper Club at the Miami airport the next day at noon sharp. What she was going to want to do was go to the desk and ask for Michelle. She was going to want to tell Michelle that she was meeting Gary Barnett.

“Who exactly is Gary Barnett,” she said.

“Michelle’s the blonde, not the spic. Make sure it’s Michelle you talk to. The spic is Adele, Adele doesn’t know me.”

“Gary Barnett is you?”

“Just do it my way for a change.”

She had done it his way.

Gary wants you to make yourself comfortable, Michelle had said.

If I could please see your Clipper Club card, Adele had said.

Michelle had rolled her eyes. I saw her card, Michelle had said.

Elena sat down. On a corner sofa a portly man in a silk suit was talking on the telephone, his voice rising and falling, an unbroken flow of English and Spanish, now imploring, now threatening, oblivious to the announcements of flights for Guayaquil and Panama and Guatemala, oblivious to Elena, oblivious even to the woman at his side, who was thin and gray-haired and wore a cashmere cardigan and expensive walking shoes.

Mr. Lee, the man kept saying.

Then, finally: Let me ask you one question, Mr. Lee. Do we have the sugar or don’t we. All right then. You tell me we have it. Then explain to me this one thing. How do we prove we have it. Because believe me, Mr. Lee, we are losing credibility with the buyer. All right. Listen. Here is the situation. We have ninety-two million dollars tied up since Thursday. This is Tuesday. Believe me, ninety-two million dollars is not small change. Is not chicken shit, Mr. Lee. The telex was supposed to be sent on Friday. I come up from San Salvador this morning to close the deal, the Sun Bank in Miami is supposed to have the telex, the Sun Bank in Miami does not have the telex. Now I ask you, Mr. Lee. Please. What am I supposed to do?

The man slammed down the phone.

The gray-haired woman took a San Salvador newspaper from her Vuitton tote and began reading it.

The man stared balefully at Elena.

Elena shifted her gaze, a hedge against the possibility that eye contact could be construed as standing out. Across the room a steward was watching General Hospital on the television set above the bar.

She heard the man again punching numbers into the telephone but did not look at him.

Mr. Lee, the man said.

A silence.

Elena allowed her eyes to wander. The headline on the paper the woman was reading was GOBIERNO VENDE 85 % LECHE DONADA.

All right, the man said. You are not Mr. Lee. My mistake. But if you are truly the son you are also Mr. Lee. So let me speak to your father, Mr. Lee. What is this, he cannot come to the phone? I am talking to him, he tells me to call back in ten minutes. I am calling back from a pay phone in the Miami airport and he cannot take the call? What is this? Mr. Lee. Please. I am getting from you both a bunch of lies. A bunch of misinformation. Disinformation. Lies. Mr. Lee. Listen to me. It costs me maybe a million dollars to put you and your father out of business, believe me, I will spend it.

Again the phone was slammed down.

GOBIERNO VENDE 85 % LECHE DONADA. The government sells eighty-five percent of donated milk. It struck Elena that her Spanish must have failed, this was too broad to be an accurate translation.

Elena did not yet know how broad a story could get.

Again the man punched in numbers. Mr. Elman. Let me tell you the situation here. I am calling from a pay phone in the Miami airport. I fly up from San Salvador today. Because today the deal was to close. Today the Sun Bank in Miami would have the telex to approve the line of credit. Today the Sun Bank in Miami does not have the telex. Today I am sitting in the Miami airport and I don’t know what to do. That is the situation here. Okay, Mr. Elman. We have a little problem here, which I’m sure we can solve.

The calls continued. Mr. Lee. Mr. Elman. Mr. Gordon. Someone was in Toronto and someone else was in Los Angeles and many people were in Miami. At four o’clock Elena heard the door buzz. At the moment she allowed herself to look up she saw Barry Sedlow, without breaking stride as he walked toward her, lay an envelope on the table next to the telephone the Salvadoran was using.

“Here is my concern,” the Salvadoran was saying into the telephone as he fingered the envelope. “Mr. Elman. You and I, we have confianza.” The Salvadoran placed the envelope in an inner pocket of his silk jacket. “But what I am being fed from Mr. Lee is a bunch of disinformation.”

Later in Barry Sedlow’s car on the way to Hialeah she had asked who the Salvadoran was.

“What made you think he was Salvadoran,” Barry Sedlow said.

She told him.

“Lot of people say they came up from San Salvador this morning, lot of people read Salvadoran papers, that doesn’t make them Salvadoran.”

She asked what the man was if not Salvadoran.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t Salvadoran,” Barry Sedlow said. “Did I. You have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions.” In the silence that followed he slowed to a stop at an intersection, reached inside the Dolphins warm-up jacket he was wearing and took aim at the streetlight.

One thing she had learned growing up around her father: she recognized guns.

The gun Barry Sedlow had taken from inside his warm-up jacket was a 9mm Browning with sound suppressor.

The engine was idling and the sound of the silenced shot inaudible.

The light shattered and the intersection went dark.

“Transit passenger,” Barry Sedlow had said as he transferred his foot from brake to accelerator. “Already on the six-thirty back to San Sal. Not our deal.” When I say that Elena was not one of those who saw how every moment could connect I mean that it did not occur to her that a transit passenger need show no visa.

Cast your mind back.

Refresh your memory if necessary: go to Nexis, go to microfiche.

Try to locate the most interesting news stories of the period in question.

Scroll past any stories that led or even made the evening news.

Move down instead until you locate the kind of two-inch wire story that tended to appear just under the page-fourteen continuation of the page-one story on congressional response to the report of the Kissinger Commission, say, or opposite the page-nineteen continuation of the page-one story about the federal court ruling upholding investigation of possible violations of the Neutrality Act.

The kind of two-inch wire story that had to do with chartered aircraft of uncertain ownership that did or did not leave one or another southern airport loaded with one or another kind of cargo.

Many manifests were eventually analyzed by those who followed such stories.

Many personnel records were eventually accessed.

Many charts were eventually drawn detailing the ways in which the spectral companies with the high-concept names (Amalgamated Commercial Enterprises Inc., Defex S.A., Energy Resources International) tended to interlock.

These two-inch aircraft stories were not always identical. In some stories the aircraft in question was reported not to have left one or another southern airport but to have crashed in Georgia or experienced mechanical difficulties in Texas or been seized in the Bahamas in relation to one or another narcotics investigation. Nor was the cargo in these stories always identical: inspection of the cargo revealed in some cases an unspecified number of reconditioned Soviet AK-47s, in other cases unspecified numbers of M67 fragmentation grenades, AR-15s, M-60s, RPG-7 rocket launchers, boxes of ammo, pallets of POMZ-2 fragmentation mines, British Aerospace L-9 antitank mines, Chinese Type 72A and Italian Valmara 69 antipersonnel mines.

69s.

Epperson had floated a figure of three dollars per for 69s and now he was claiming the market had dropped to two per.

I’m not sure I know what business Epperson is in.

Christ, what business are they all in.

Some people in Washington said that the flights described in these stories were not occurring, other people in Washington (more careful people in Washington, more specific people in Washington, people in Washington who did not intend to perjure themselves when the hearings rolled in) said that the flights could not be occurring, or could only be occurring, if indeed they were occurring, outside the range of possible knowledge.

I myself learned to be specific during this period.

I myself learned to be careful.

I myself learned the art of the conditional.

I recall asking Treat Morrison, during the course of my preliminary interviews with him at his office in Washington, if in fact, to his knowledge, anyone in the United States government could have knowledge that one or more such flights could be supplying arms to the so-called contra forces for the purpose of overthrowing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

There had been a silence.

Treat Morrison had picked up a pen and put it down.

I flattered myself that I was on the edge of something revelatory.

“To the extent that the area in question touches on the lake,” Treat Morrison said, “and to the extent that the lake has been historically construed as our lake, it goes without saying that we could have an interest. However.”

Again he fell silent.

I waited.

We had gotten as far as claiming the Caribbean as our lake, our sea, mare nostrum.

“However,” Treat Morrison repeated.

I debated with myself whether I would accept an off-the-record or not-for-attribution stipulation.

“We don’t track that kind of activity,” Treat Morrison said then.

One of those flights that no one was tracking lifted off from Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at one-thirty on the morning of June 26 1984. The aircraft was a Lockheed L-100. The official documents filed by the pilot showed a crew of five, two passengers, a cargo of assorted auto parts, and the destination San José, Costa Rica.

The U.S. Customs official who certified the manifest did not elect to physically inspect the cargo.

The plane did not land in San José, Costa Rica.

The plane had no reason to land in San José, Costa Rica, because an alternative infrastructure was already in place: the eight-thousand-foot runways laid by the 46th Combat Engineers during the aftermath of the Big Pine II maneuvers were already in place. The radar sites were in place. The water purification and delivery systems were in place. “You got yourself a regular little piece of U.S.A. here,” the pilot of the Lockheed L-100 said to Elena McMahon as they waited on the dry grass off the runway while the cargo was unloaded.

“Actually I’ll be going right back.” She felt a sudden need to distance herself from whatever was going on here. “I mean I left my car at the airport.”

“Long-term parking I hope,” the pilot said.

What was also in place was the deal.

We don’t track that kind of activity.

No comment. Thank you. Goodbye.