The Last Thing He Wanted

1

The persona of “the writer” does not attract me. As a way of being it has its flat sides. Nor am I comfortable around the literary life: its traditional dramatic line (the romance of solitude, of interior struggle, of the lone seeker after truth) came to seem early on a trying conceit. I lost patience somewhat later with the conventions of the craft, with exposition, with transitions, with the development and revelation of “character.” To this point I recall my daughter’s resistance when asked, in the eighth grade at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles, to write an “autobiographical” essay (your life, age thirteen, thesis, illustration, summary, just try it, no more than two double-spaced pages neatly typed please) on whatever event or individual or experience had “most changed” her life. I mentioned a few of the applicable perennials (trip to Europe, volunteer job in hospital, teacher she didn’t like because he made her work too hard and then it turned out to be worth it), she, less facile, less careful, more sentient, mentioned the death of her best friend in fourth grade.

Yes, I said, ashamed. Better. You have it.

“Not really,” she said.

Why not, I said.

“Because it didn’t actually change my life. I mean I cried, I was sad, I wrote a lot about it in my diary, yes, but what changed?”

I recall explaining that “change” was merely the convention at hand: I said that while it was true that the telling of a life tended to falsify it, gave it a form it did not intrinsically possess, this was just a fact of writing things down, something we all accepted.

I realized as I was saying this that I no longer did.

I realized that I was increasingly interested only in the technical, in how to lay down the AM-2 aluminum matting for the runway, in whether or not parallel taxiways and high-speed turnoffs must be provided, in whether an eight-thousand-foot runway requires sixty thousand square yards of operational apron or only forty thousand. If the AM-2 is laid directly over laterite instead of over plastic membrane seal, how long would we have before base failure results? (How long would we need before base failure results was another question altogether, one I left to the Treat Morrisons of this world.) How large a base camp will a fifteen-hundred-kilowatt generator service? In the absence of high-capacity deep wells, can water be effectively treated with tactical erdlators? I give you Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844–1900: “When man does not have firm, calm lines on the horizon of his life — mountain and forest lines, as it were — then man’s most inner will becomes agitated, preoccupied and wistful.”

Tactical erdlators have been my mountain and forest lines.

This business of Elena McMahon, then, is hard for me.

This business of what “changed” her, what “motivated” her, what made her do it.

I see her standing in the dry grass off the runway, her arms bare, her sunglasses pushed up into her loose hair, her black silk shift wrinkled from the flight, and wonder what made her think a black silk shift bought off a sale rack at Bergdorf Goodman during the New York primary was the appropriate thing to wear on an unscheduled cargo flight at one-thirty in the morning out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, destination San José Costa Rica but not quite.

Her sunglasses are pushed up but her eyes are shut tight.

A dog (underfed, mangy, of no remarkable size) is bursting from the open door of a concrete structure off the apron and racing toward her.

The man beside her, his head shaved, cutoff jeans slung below his navel, is singing the theme from Bonanza as he crouches and beckons to the dog.

We got a right to pick a little fight—

Bo-nan-za—

If anyone fights with any one of us—

He’s got a fight with me—

Her eyes remain shut.

On second thought I am not sure what would be, in this context, “appropriate.”

Possibly the baseball cap lent her by one of the refueling crew. The cap was lettered NBC SPORTS, its familiar peacock logo smeared with diesel fuel.

“Actually I think somebody was supposed to meet me,” she said to the pilot when the man with the shaved head had disappeared and the last pallet been unloaded and the refueling completed. Over the past dozen hours she had come to see the pilot as her partner, her backup, her protection, her single link to the day before.

“Looks like somebody didn’t give you the full skinny,” the pilot said.

Smell of jasmine, pool of blue jacaranda.

Coincidentally, although not really, since it was in the role of mother that I first knew Elena, Catherine Janklow was also in that eighth-grade class at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. Elena’s performance as a Westlake Mom (so we were called in school bulletins) was so attentive to detail as to be impenetrable. She organized benefits for the scholarship fund, opened her house for picnics and ditch days and sleepovers, got up every Friday at four hours before dawn to deliver the Astronomy Club to remote star-watching locations in Lancaster or Latigo Canyon or the Santa Susana Mountains, and was duly repaid by the attendance of three eighth graders at her Westlake Career Day workshop on “Getting Started as a Reporter.”

“You’re at an age right now when it’s impossible even to imagine how much your life is going to change,” Elena told the three eighth graders who turned up for her Career Day workshop.

Two of the eighth graders maintained expressions of polite disbelief.

The third jabbed a finger into the air, then crossed her arms truculently across her chest.

Elena looked at the child. Her name was Melissa Simon. She was Mort Simon’s daughter. Mort Simon was someone Wynn knew who had improved the year by taking a motion picture studio private and spinning off its real assets into various of his personal companies.

“Melissa.”

“Excuse me,” Melissa Simon said. “But I don’t quite see why my life is supposed to change.”

There had been a silence.

“That’s an interesting point,” Elena had said then.

Catherine had not attended her mother’s workshop on Getting Started as a Reporter. Catherine had signed up for a workshop conducted by a Westlake Mom who happened to be a business affairs lawyer at Paramount (“Motion Picture Development — Where Do You Fit In?”), then skipped it to finish her own eighth-grade autobiographical essay on the event or individual or experience that had “most changed” her life. “What is definitely most changing my life this semester is my mother getting cancer,” Catherine’s autobiographical essay began, and continued for two neatly typed double-spaced pages. Catherine’s mother, according to Catherine, was that semester “too tired to do anything normal” because every morning after dropping the car pool at school she had been going to UCLA for what Catherine knowledgeably described as “radiation zapping following the exsishun [sic] of a stage 1 good prognose [sic] breast lesion.” That this was not a fact generally known does not, to me, suggest “motivation.”

Treat Morrison knew it, because he recognized the scar.

Diane had had the same scar.

Look, he said when Elena fell silent. What difference does it make. You get it one way or you get it another, nobody comes through free.

She sat on the dry grass in her black silk shift and the cap lettered NBC SPORTS and watched the L-100 taxi out for takeoff and tried to think what to do next. The cargo had been loaded onto flatbed trucks. Whoever was supposed to make the payment had not appeared. She had thought at first that the man with the shaved head and the cutoff jeans was her contact but he was not. He was, he said, on his way home to Tulsa from Angola. He was, he said, just lending a little expertise while he was in this particular area.

She had not asked him how this particular area could reasonably be construed as on the way to Tulsa from Angola.

She had not asked him what expertise he was lending.

During the ten minutes she had spent trying to talk the pilot into waiting for her contact the flatbed trucks had been driven away.

She was going to need to rethink this step by step.

She was going to need to reconnoiter, reassess.

The L-100 and the zone of safety it represented were about to vanish into the cloud cover.

Fly it down, fly it back, the pilot had said. That’s my contract. I get paid to drive the bus. I get paid to drive the bus when the engines are overheating. I get paid to drive the bus when the loran goes down. I don’t get paid to take care of the passengers.

Her partner, her backup, her protection.

Her single link to the day before.

He had flown it down and now he was flying it back.

Per his contract.

She did not think it possible that her father would find himself in exactly this situation, yet she had done exactly what he said he had to do. She had done exactly what her father said he had to do and she had done exactly what Barry Sedlow said to do.

Just do it my way for a change.

This would very soon be all right.

She would very soon know what to do.

She felt alert, a little light-headed. She did not yet know where she was, and the clearing in which the strip had been laid down had suddenly cleared of people, but she was ready, open to information.

This should be Costa Rica.

If this was Costa Rica the first thing she needed to do was get to San José.

She did not know what she would do if she did get to San José but there would be a hotel, offices of American banks, an airport with scheduled carriers.

Through the open door of the concrete structure off the apron she could see, intermittently, someone moving, someone walking around, a man, a man with a ponytail, a man with a ponytail wearing fatigues. She kept her eyes on this door and tried to recall lessons learned in other venues, other vocations. One thing she had learned during her four-year sojourn at the Herald Examiner was how easy it was to get into places where no one was supposed to be. The trick was to attach oneself to service personnel, people who had no particular investment in who got in and who stayed out. She had on one occasion followed a telephone crew into a locked hangar in which an experimental stealth bomber was being readied for its first rollout. She had on more than one occasion gotten inside a house where someone did not want to talk to her by striking up conversation with the pool man, the gardener, the dog groomer who had run a cord inside the kitchen door to plug in a dryer.

In fact she had mentioned this during the course of her Westlake Career Day workshop.

Melissa Simon had again raised her hand. She had a point she wanted to make. The point she wanted to make was that “nobody from the media could have ever gotten into those houses if the families had normal security and their public relations people were doing their job.”

Which had prompted Elena to raise the Westlake Career Day stakes exponentially by suggesting, in words that either did or did not include the phrase “try living in the real world for a change,” that very few families in the world outside three or four well-defined neighborhoods on the West Side of Los Angeles County had either public relations people or what one very fortunate eighth grader might call “normal security.”

Which had caused Wynn Janklow, after this was reported to him the next day by three different people (Mort Simon’s partner, Mort Simon’s lawyer, and the young woman who was described as Mort Simon’s “issues person”), to leave half his lunch at Hillcrest uneaten in order to call Elena.

“I hear you’ve been telling our friends’ kids their parents live in a dream world.”

In the first place, she said, this was not an exact quotation.

He said something else but the connection was bad.

In the second place, she said, Mort Simon was not her friend. She didn’t even know Mort Simon.

Wynn was calling from his Mercedes, driving east on Pico, and had turned up Robertson before his voice faded back in.

“You want everybody in town saying you talk like a shiksa,” he had said, “you’re getting the job done.”

“I am a shiksa,” she had said.

“That’s your problem, not mine,” he had said.

In fact she did know Mort Simon.

Of course she knew Mort Simon.

The house in Beverly Hills where she sat on the sidewalk waiting for the pool report on the celebrity fund-raiser was as it happened Mort Simon’s house. She had even seen him briefly, lifting a transparent flap of the Regal Rents tent to survey the barricade behind which the press was waiting. He had looked directly at her but such was his generalized view of the world outside his tent that he had not recognized her and she had not spoken.

“Send out some refreshments,” she had heard him say to a waiter before he dropped the flap, although no refreshments ever materialized. “Like, you know, diet Pepsi, water, I’m not paying so they can tank up.”

The wife and daughter no longer lived in the house. The wife and daughter had moved to a town house just inside the Beverly Hills line from Century City and the daughter had transferred from Westlake to Beverly Hills High School. Catherine had told her that.

Living in the real world.

We had a real life and now we don’t.

She put that out of her mind.

Other lessons.

More recent venues.

Not long after moving to Washington she had interviewed an expert on nuclear security who had explained how easy it would be to score plutonium. The security for nuclear facilities, he said, was always contracted out. The contractors in turn hired locally and supplied their hires with minimum rounds of ammunition. Meaning, he had said, “you got multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security systems being operated by downsized sheriff’s deputies with maybe enough ammo to take down a coyote.”

She remembered exactly what he said because the interview had ended up in the Sunday magazine and this had been the pull quote.

If she could think of the man with the ponytail as a downsized sheriff’s deputy, a downsized sheriff’s deputy lacking even a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security system, this would be all right.

All it would take was nerve.

All it would take was a show of belonging wherever it was she wanted to be.

She got up, brushed the grass off her legs and walked to the open door of the concrete structure off the apron. The man with the ponytail was seated at a wooden crate on which there was an electric fan, a bottle of beer and a worn deck of Bicycle cards. He drained the beer, lobbed the bottle into a metal drum, and, with two fingers held stiff, turned over a card.

“Shit,” the man said, then looked up.

“You’re supposed to see that I get to San José,” she said. “They were supposed to have told you that.”

The man turned over another card. “Who was supposed to tell me that.”

This was going to require more work than the average telephone crew, pool man, dog groomer.

“If I don’t get to San José they’re going to be wondering why.”

“Who is.”

She gambled. “I think you know who.”

“Give me a name.”

She had not been given names. She had asked Barry Sedlow for names and he had talked about compartmentalization, cutouts, need-to-know.

You wouldn’t give me their real names anyway, she had said. Just give me the names they use.

What’s that supposed to mean, he had said.

The names they use like you use Gary Barnett, she had said.

I’m not authorized to give you that information, he had said. Somebody’s supposed to meet you. Your need-to-know stops there.

Somebody was supposed to meet her but somebody did not meet her.

Somebody was supposed to make the payment and somebody had not made the payment.

She was aware as she watched the man turn over cards of a sudden darkening outside, then of lightning. There was a map of Costa Rica on the wall of the concrete structure, reinforcing the impression that this was Costa Rica but offering no clue as to where in Costa Rica. The overhead light flickered and went out. The electric fan fluttered to a stop. In the absence of background noise she realized that she had been hearing the whine of an overworked refrigerator, now silent.

The man with the ponytail got up, opened the refrigerator, and took another beer from its darkened interior. He did not offer one to Elena. Instead he sat down and turned over another card, whistling softly between his teeth, as if Elena were invisible.

Who is.

I think you know who.

Give me a name.

“Epperson,” she said. She seized the name from the ether of the past ten days. “Max Epperson.”

The man with the ponytail looked at her, then shuffled the cards and got up. “I could be overdue a night or two in Josie,” the man said.

2

When I am away from this I tend to elongate the time sequence, which was in fact quite short. It was early on the morning of June 26 1984 when Elena McMahon left Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on the L-100, and late the same morning when the L-100 landed somewhere in Costa Rica. It was close to midnight of the same day (first there had been a bridge washed out, then a two-hour stop parked outside what seemed to be a military installation) when Elena McMahon got to San José. You’re doing nothing, the man with the ponytail had said when she asked what they were doing at the military installation. What I’m doing doesn’t concern you.

He had gotten out of the truck.

Anyone asks, he had said, tell them you’re waiting for Mr. Jones.

From the time he reappeared two hours later until they reached San José he had not spoken. He had instead sung to himself, repeated fragments of what appeared to be the same song, so inaudibly that she knew he was singing only by the periodic spasms of pounding on the steering wheel as he exhaled the words “great balls of fire.” In San José he had driven directly to a hotel on what appeared to be a downtown side street. Free ride ends here, he had said. Seen from the unlit street the hotel had an impressive glass porte cochere and polished brass letters reading HOTEL COLONIAL but once she was inside the small lobby the promise faded. There was no air-conditioning. An industrial fluorescent light flickered overhead, casting a sickly light on the stained velour upholstery of the single chair. As she waited for the desk clerk to finish a telephone call she had begun to find it inauspicious that the man with the ponytail had brought her to this hotel without ever asking where she wanted to go (in fact she would have had no idea where to go, she had never before been in San José), just pulled directly under the porte cochere and stopped, letting the engine idle as he waited for her to get out.

Why here, she had asked.

Why not here. He had flicked his headlights off and on several times. I thought you wanted to run into people you know.

There was a pay telephone on the wall by the elevator.

She would call Barry Sedlow.

The first thing to do was get in touch with Barry Sedlow.

As she opened her bag and tried to locate the card on which he had written the 800 number for his beeper she became aware of the desk clerk watching her.

She would tell the desk clerk she needed a drugstore, a doctor, a clínica.

She would get out of this place.

She had seen a bus station on the way to the hotel, the bus station would be open, she could make the call from the bus station.

She did not bother to remember the directions the desk clerk gave her to the clínica but as it happened she passed it on her way to the bus station. That at least was good. This could be going her way. In case anyone was watching she had been walking toward the clínica.

The bus station was almost deserted.

The dispatcher was sleeping noisily in a metal cage above the concourse.

The public telephones in the waiting room had rotary dials and could not be used to leave a message on a beeper, which was the only number she had for Barry Sedlow. Emergencia, she said over and over when she managed to wake the dispatcher. She held out a ten-dollar bill and the KROME GUN CLUB card on which Barry Sedlow had written the 800 number. La clínica. Mi padre. The dispatcher examined the bill and the card, then dialed the number on his pushbutton phone and left as a callback number one of the public phones in the waiting room.

She sat on a molded plastic bench and drank a local cola, sweet and warm and flat, and waited for the phone to ring.

Don’t get your balls in an uproar, Barry Sedlow said when she picked up the phone. You made the delivery, you’ll get the payment. Sometimes these things take a little longer, you got a whole bureaucracy you’re dealing with, they got requisitions, regulations, paperwork, special ways they have to do things, they don’t just peel off cash like guys on the street. Be smart. Stay put. I’ll make a few calls, get back to you. You cool?

All right, she had said finally.

By the way, he had said then. I wouldn’t call your dad. I’m keeping him in the picture about where you are and what you’re doing, but I wouldn’t call him.

It would not have occurred to her to call her father but she asked why not.

Because it wouldn’t be smart, he had said. I’ll get back to you at the Colonial.

It was almost dawn, after she had gone back to the Hotel Colonial and let the desk clerk take her passport and run her credit card, after she had gone upstairs to the single room on the third floor and sat on the edge of the metal bed and abandoned the idea of sleep, before it occurred to her that during the call to Barry Sedlow she had never once mentioned the name of the hotel.

So what, Barry Sedlow said when he finally called back and she put this to him.

Big fucking deal. Where else would you be.

This second conversation with Barry Sedlow took place on the afternoon of June 28. It was the evening of July 1 when Barry Sedlow called the third time. It was the morning of July 2 when, using the commercial ticket provided her, a one-way nonexchangeable ticket to a designated destination, Elena McMahon left San José for the island where the incident occurred that should not have occurred.

Should not have occurred and could not have been predicted.

By any quantitative measurement.

3

You will have noticed that I am not giving you the name of this island.

This is deliberate, a decision on my part, and not a decision (other writers have in fact named the island, for example, the authors of the Rand study) based on classification.

The name would get in the way.

If you knew the name you might recall days or nights spent on this island en route to or in lieu of more desirable islands, the metallic taste of tinned juice in rum punches, the mosquitoes under the net at night, the rented villa where the septic tank backed up, the unpleasantness over the Jet Ski misunderstanding, the hours spent waiting in the jammed airport when the scheduled Windward Air or BIWI flights failed to materialize, the piece of needlepoint you meant to finish and instead spotted with coconut oil, the book you meant to read and distractedly set aside, the tedium of all forlorn tropical places.

The determined resistance to gravity, the uneasy reduction of the postcolonial dilemma to the Jet Ski misunderstanding.

The guilty pleasure of buckling in and clearing the ground and knowing that you will step off this plane in the developed world.

Little guessing that the pleasant life of the plantations was about to disappear, as the history of the island you dutifully bought at the airport puts it. Paradisaical as the sight of land must have been after the long voyage from the Cape Verdes. Not to overlook the contribution made by early Jewish settlers after the construction of their historic crushed-coral synagogue, so situated as to offer a noteworthy view of Rum Cay. Signalling a resounding defeat for the Party that had spearheaded the movement toward The Independence.

Face it.

You did not, during your sojourns on this island, want to know its history. (High points: Arawaks, hurricane, sugar, Middle Passage, the abandonment known as The Independence.) You did not, if you had planned well, have reason to frequent its major city. (Must see: that historic crushed-coral synagogue, its noteworthy view of Rum Cay.) You had no need to venture beyond the rust-stained but still daunting (school of Edward Durell Stone) facade of our embassy there. Had you discovered such need (bad planning, trouble, a lost passport), you would have found it a larger embassy than extant American interests on the island would seem to require, a relic of the period when Washington had been gripped by the notion that the emergence of independent nations on single-crop islands with annual per capita incomes in three digits offered the exact optimum conditions under which private capital could be siphoned off the Asian rim and into mare nostrum.

Many phantom investment schemes had been encouraged on this island. Many training sessions had been planned, many promotional tours staged. Many pilot programs had been undertaken, each cited at its inception as a flawless model of how a responsible superpower could help bring an LDC, or Lesser Developed Country, into the roster of the self-sufficient NICs, or New Industrializing Countries. On an island where most human concerns were obliterated by weather, this was an embassy in which tropical doubts had been held at bay via the mastery of acronyms.

It was still in 1984 possible to hear in this embassy about “CBMs,” or Confidence Building Measures.

It was still in 1984 possible to hear about “BHN,” or Basic Human Needs.

What could not be obfuscated by acronym tended to be reduced to its most cryptic diminutive. I recall hearing at this embassy a good deal about “the Del” before I learned that it referred to a formula for predicting events developed by the Rand Corporation and less jauntily known as the Delphi Method (that which should not have happened and could not have been predicted by any quantitative measurement had presumably not been predicted by employment of the Del), and I sat through an entire study group session on “Ap Tech — Uses and Misuses” before I divined that the topic at hand was something called the Appropriate Technology movement, proponents of which apparently did not believe that technology developed in the first world was appropriate for transfer to the third. I recall heated discussion on whether the introduction of data processing into the island’s literacy program either could or could not be construed as Ap Tech. Tech skills are in a different basket, an economic attaché kept repeating. Tech skills are a basket-two priority. A series of political appointees, retired contributors from the intermountain West, had passed in and out of the official residence without ever finding need to master the particular dialect spoken in this embassy.

Alexander Brokaw was of course not a political appointee.

Alex Brokaw was career, with a c.v. of sensitive postings.

Alex Brokaw had arrived on this island six months before to do a specific job.

A job that entailed bringing in the pros.

Because, as Alex Brokaw often said, if and when this switches gear into a full-scale effort, we’ll be rotating troops in and out, which is good for home-front morale but not good for construction continuity. So we damn well better bring the pros in up front.

The pros and of course the Special Forces guys.

A job that entailed establishing the presence on the island of this selected group of Americans, and discouraging the presence of all others.

Which is why Alex Brokaw mentioned to his DCM, after the incident at the embassy’s Fourth of July picnic, that it might be useful to run a background on Elise Meyer, which was the name on the passport Elena McMahon was by then using.

4

When I try to understand how Elena McMahon could have assimilated with no perceptible beat the logic of traveling on a passport not her own to a place she had no previous intention of going, could have accepted so readily that radical revision of who she was, could have walked into a life not her own and lived it, I consider the last time I actually saw her.

Academy Award night, 1982.

When she was still living in the house on the Pacific Coast Highway.

It was five months later when she walked out of that house and enrolled Catherine at an Episcopal boarding school in Rhode Island and got herself hired (on the basis not of her long-gone four-year career at the Herald Examiner but of an editorial hunch that Wynn Janklow’s scrupulously bilateral campaign contributions might still buy his estranged wife some access) at the Washington Post.

All that happened very fast.

All that happened so fast that the first I knew of it was when I got home from France in September of 1982 and began to go through the accumulated mail and was about to discard unopened, because it looked like one or another plea in support of or opposition to one or another issue, a plain white envelope with metered postage and a Washington D.C. return address. Had I not been distracted by a phone call I would never have opened the envelope, but I was, and I did, and there it was: a handwritten note, signed Elena, saying that of course I already knew that she and Catherine had relocated to the East Coast but now she was settled and just getting around to sending out her address. The printed name on the change-of-address card clipped to the note was Elena McMahon.

“Relocated” was the word she used.

As if leaving Wynn Janklow had been a corporate transfer.

I had not already known that she and Catherine had relocated to the East Coast.

I had known nothing.

All I knew was that on Academy Award night that year Elena McMahon had still been Elena Janklow, sitting in front of a plate of untouched cassoulet at the party that was in our rather insular community at that time the single event approaching a command performance, absently twining a Mylar ribbon torn from a balloon into the rhinestone strap of her dress. I never once saw her look at the big television screens mounted at every eye line, not even at those moments when a local favorite was up for an award and the party fell momentarily silent. Nor did she observe the other core tribal custom of the evening, which was to spring up and move toward the bar as soon as the awards ended, allowing the tables to be cleared while applauding both the triumphant arrivals of the winners and the inspirational sportsmanship of the losers.

Elena never got up at all.

Elena stayed seated, idly picking apart a table decoration to remove the miniature Oscar at its center, oblivious to winners and losers alike, oblivious even to the busboys changing the tablecloth in front of her. Only when I sat down across the table did she even look up.

“I promised Catherine,” she said about the miniature Oscar.

What she said next that Academy Award night was something I interpreted at the time to mean only that she was tired of the event’s structural festivity, that she had been dressed up in rhinestones in broad daylight since four in the afternoon and sitting at this table since five and now she wanted to go home.

I was wrong about what she said next.

As I would be wrong later to wonder how she could so readily assimilate the logic of walking into a life not her own and living it.

What she said next that Academy Award night was this: “I can’t fake this anymore.”

Suggesting that she had assimilated that logic a long time before.

5

“Somebody’s going to let you know the move they want you to make,” Barry Sedlow had said the last time he called her in San José.

“When,” she had said.

“By the way. I saw your dad. He says hi. I’m keeping him in the picture.”

Saying “hi” was not in her father’s vocabulary but she let this go. “I asked when.”

“Just stay put.”

In the six days since her arrival in San José she had left the room at the Colonial only twice, once to buy a toothbrush and a tin of aspirin, the second time to buy a T-shirt and cotton pants so that she could wash the black silk shift. She had given the maid American dollars to bring back sandwiches, coffee, once in a while a Big Mac from the McDonald’s across from the bus station.

“That’s what you told me the night I got here. I’ve been staying put. I need to know when.”

“Hard to say. Maybe tonight.” There had been a silence. “They may want you to take payment in another venue. Who knows.”

“Where.”

“They’ll let you know where.”

An hour later the envelope containing the passport and plane ticket had begun to appear, emerging at such barely perceptible speed that she was finally forced to breathe, under the locked door of her room at the Colonial.

She did not know why she had happened to look at the door at the very moment the envelope began to appear.

There had been no giveaway sound, no rustle of paper on carpet, no fumbling in the corridor.

The envelope had been clear of the door and lying motionless inside the room for a full five minutes before, still frozen, she moved to approach it. The ticket bearing the name Elise Meyer had been written by American Airlines in Miami on June 30 1984. The passport bearing the name Elise Meyer had been issued on June 30 1984 at the United States Passport Agency in Miami.

In the photograph affixed to this passport she was smiling.

In the photograph affixed to her own passport she was not.

She could not compare the two because her own passport was downstairs in the hotel safe, but she was quite certain that the photographs were otherwise similar.

She studied the photograph on the passport for some time before she sorted out how it could happen to be otherwise similar to the photograph on her own passport. It could happen to be otherwise similar to the photograph on her own passport because it had been taken at the same time, not long after she got to Washington, in a passport-photo place across from the paper. She had asked for extra Polaroids to use for visas. At some point recently on this campaign (whenever it was that the Secret Service had come on and started demanding photos for new credentials) she had stuck the five or six remaining prints in a pocket of her computer bag.

Why wouldn’t she have.

Of course she did.

Of course her computer bag was in a closet at the house in Sweetwater.

By the way. I saw your dad. He says hi. I’m keeping him in the picture.

6

Of course Dick McMahon was by then dead. Of course he had died under circumstances that would not appear in the least out of order: the notification to the nursing agency at noon on June 27 that Mr. McMahon’s night shift would no longer be required; the predictable midnight emergency twelve hours later; the fortuitous and virtually simultaneous arrival at the house in Sweetwater of the very attentive young doctor; the transfer in the early morning hours of June 28 to the two-bed room at the Clearview Convalescent Lodge in South Kendall; the flurry of visits over the next thirty-six hours from the very attentive young doctor and then the certification of the death.

It would not be unusual at this facility to see a degree of agitation in a new admission.

Nor would it be unusual, given the extreme agitation of this new admission, if a decision were made to increase sedation.

Nor would it be unusual, given the continuing attempts of this extremely agitated new admission to initiate contact with the patient in the other bed, to effect the temporary transfer of the patient in the other bed to a more comfortable gurney in the staff smoking lounge.

Nor would it be unusual if such an extremely agitated and increasingly ill new admission were, the best efforts of his very attentive young doctor notwithstanding, to just go. “Just going” was how dying was characterized at the Clearview Convalescent Lodge, by both patients and staff. He’s just going. He just went.

Nor would there be need for an autopsy, because whatever happened would be certified as having happened in a licensed care facility under the care of a licensed physician.

There would be nothing out of order about the certification.

Without question Dick McMahon would be gone by the time he was certified dead.

Which was, according to the records of the Clearview Convalescent Lodge in South Kendall, at 1:23 a.m. on the morning of June 30. Since certification occurred after midnight the bill submitted for reimbursement under Medicare A was for three full nights, June 28, 29 and 30. Policyholder deceased 171.4 was the notation placed on the Medicare A billing in the space provided for Full Description of Condition at Discharge Including Diagnostic Code.

McMAHON, Richard Allen: age 74, died under care of physician June 30, 1984, at Clearview Convalescent Lodge, South Kendall. No services are scheduled.

So read the agate-type notice appearing in the vital statistics column, which was compiled daily to include those deaths and births and marriages entered into the previous day’s public record, of the July 2 1984 edition of the Miami Herald.

It could have been established, by anyone who cared to check the nursing agency’s file on Mr. McMahon, that the June 27 call ordering the cancellation of Mr. McMahon’s night shift had been placed by a woman identifying herself as Mr. McMahon’s daughter.

It would remain unestablished who had placed the midnight call to the very attentive young doctor.

Because no one asked.

Because the single person who might have asked had not yet had the opportunity to read the agate-type notice appearing in the vital statistics column of the July 2 1984 edition of the Miami Herald.

Because the single person who might have asked did not yet know that her father was dead.

By the way. I wouldn’t call your dad. I’m keeping him in the picture about where you are and what you’re doing, but I wouldn’t call him.

Because it wouldn’t be smart.

7

At the time she left San José she did not yet know that her father was dead but there were certain things she did already know. Some of what she already knew at the time she left San José she had learned before she ever got to Costa Rica, had known in fact since the afternoon the sky went dark and the lightning forked on the horizon outside Dick McMahon’s room at Jackson Memorial and he began to tell her who it was he had to see and what it was he had to do. Some of what she already knew she had learned the day she brought him home from Jackson Memorial to the house in Sweetwater and managed to deflect his intention to drive down to where the Kitty Rex was berthed and Barry Sedlow was waiting for him. Some of what she already knew she believed to be true and some of what she already knew she believed to be delusion, but since this was a business in which truth and delusion appeared equally doubtful she was left to proceed as if even the most apparently straightforward piece of information could at any time explode.

Any piece of information was a potential fragmentation mine.

Fragmentation mines came immediately to mind because of one of the things she already knew.

This was one of the things she already knew: the shipment on the L-100 that left Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport at one-thirty on the morning of June 26 was composed exclusively of fragmentation mines, three hundred and twenty-four pallets, each pallet loaded with twelve crates, each crate containing between ten and two hundred mines depending upon their type and size. Some of these mines were antitank and some antipersonnel. There were the forty-seven-inch L-9 antitanks made by British Aerospace and there were the thirteen-inch PT-MI-BA III antitanks made by the Czechs. There were the POMZ-2 antipersonnels and there were the Chinese Type 72A antipersonnels and there were the Italian Valmara 69 antipersonnels.

69s.

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

When the pallets of 69s had finally been unloaded on the runway that morning she had been handed a hammer by the man with the shaved head and cutoff jeans and told to open a crate so that he could verify the merchandise.

Open it yourself, she had said, offering him back the hammer.

It doesn’t work that way, he had said, not taking the hammer.

She had hesitated.

He had unknotted a T-shirt from his belt and pulled it over his bare chest. The T-shirt was printed with an American flag and the legend THESE COLORS DON’T RUN.

I got nowhere particular to go, he had said, so it’s your call.

She had pried open the crate and indicated the contents.

He had extracted one of the small plastic devices, examined it, walked away and placed it on the ground halfway between Elena and the concrete structure. When he returned to Elena he was singing tunelessly, snatches of the theme from Bonanza.

He had moved back, and motioned her to do the same.

Then he had aimed a remote at the plastic device and whistled.

When she saw the dog burst from the open door of the concrete structure she had closed her eyes. The explosion had occurred between We got a right to pick a little fight and Bo-nan-za. The silence that followed was broken only by the long diminishing shriek of the dog.

“Guaranteed sixty-foot-diameter kill zone,” the man who was on his way from Angola to Tulsa had said then.

Here was the second thing she already knew: this June 26 shipment was not the first such shipment her father had arranged. He had been arranging such shipments all through the spring and into the summer of 1984, a minimum of two and usually three or four a month, C-123s, Convair 440s, L-100s, whatever they sent up to be filled, rusty big bellies sitting on the back runways at Lauderdale-Hollywood and West Palm and Opa-Locka and MIA waiting to be loaded with AK-47s, M-16s, MAC-10s, C-4, whatever was on the street, whatever was out there, whatever Dick McMahon could still promote on the strength of his connections, his contacts, his fifty years of doing a little business in Miami and in Houston and in Las Vegas and in Phoenix and in the piney woods of Alabama and Georgia.

These had not been easy shipments to assemble.

He had put these shipments together on credit, on goodwill, on a shared drink here and a promise there and a tale told at the Miami Springs Holiday Inn at two in the morning, on the shared yearning among what he called “these fellows I know for a long time” for one last score.

He had called in all his markers.

He had put himself on the line, spread paper all over the Southeast, thrown the dice just this one last time, one last bet on the million-dollar payday.

The million-dollar payday that was due to come with the delivery of the June 26 shipment.

The million-dollar payday that was scheduled to occur on the runway in Costa Rica where the June 26 shipment had just been unloaded.

One million American in Citibank traveler’s checks, good as gold.

Of course I have to turn around half to these fellows I know a long time who advanced me the stuff.

Which complicates the position I’m in now.

Elite. You see the position I’m in.

Five, ten years ago I might never have gotten out on a limb this way, I paid up front and got paid up front, did it clean, that was my strict motto, do it clean, cash and carry, maybe I’m getting old, maybe I played this wrong, but hell, Ellie, think about it, when was I going to see another shot like this one.

Don’t give me goddamn hindsight.

Hindsight is for shoe clerks.

Five, ten years ago, sure, I might have done it another way, but five, ten years ago we weren’t in the middle of the goddamnest hot market anybody ever saw. So what can you do. Strike while the iron is hot, so you run a little risk, so you get out on a limb for a change, it’s all you can do as I figure it.

So anyway.

So what.

You can see I need this deal.

You can see I’m in a position where I need to go down there and make the collection.

It was the figure that broke her heart.

The evenness of the figure.

The size of the figure.

The figure that was part of what she believed to be a delusion, the figure that had been the bel canto of her childhood, the figure that was now a memory, an echo, a dream, a romance, an old man’s fairy tale.

The million-dollar score, the million-dollar pop, the million-dollar payday.

The pop that was already half owed to other people, the payday that was already garnisheed.

The score that was not even a score anymore.

I’m in for a unit, my father’s doing two, Wynn Janklow would say to indicate investments of one and two hundred million dollars.

Million-dollar score, million-dollar payday.

She had gone her own way.

She had made her own life.

She had married a man who did not count money in millions but in units.

She had turned a deaf ear, she had turned her back.

It might be you’d just called from wherever.

In the creased snapshot she had taken from her mother’s bedroom her father was holding a bottle of beer and her mother was wearing a barbecue apron printed with pitchforks and the words OUT OF THE FRYING PAN INTO THE FIRE.

Or it might be that you hadn’t.

She remembered the day the snapshot was taken.

Fourth of July, she was nine or ten, a friend of her father’s had brought fireworks up from the border, fat little sizzler rockets she had not liked and sparklers that made fireflies in the hot desert twilight.

Half a margarita and I’m already flying, her mother had kept saying.

This is all right, her father had kept saying. Who needs the goombahs, we got our own show right here.

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

What’s going to happen now, her father had said on the day she brought him home to the house in Sweetwater. Goddamn. Ellie. What’s going to happen now.

I’ll take care of it, she had said.

By eight o’clock on the morning of July 2 she had already checked out of the Hotel Colonial and was in the taxi on her way to the San José airport. By eight o’clock on the morning of July 2 she did not yet know that her father’s obituary had appeared in that morning’s Miami Herald, but she did know something else.

This was the third thing she already knew.

She had asked for her passport when she checked out.

Her own passport.

The passport she had left at the desk the night she arrived.

For the authorities, for safekeeping.

The clerk was quite certain that it had been returned to her.

Por cierto, he had repeated. Certísimo.

The airport taxi had been waiting outside.

If you would look again, she had said. An American passport. McMahon. Elena McMahon.

The clerk had opened the safe, removed several passports, fanned them on the desk, and shrugged.

None of the passports were American.

In the mailboxes behind the clerk she could see room keys, a few messages.

The box for her room was empty.

She considered this.

The clerk raised an index finger, tapped his temple, and smiled. Tengo la solución, he said. Since the passport had certainly been returned to her, the passport would doubtless be found in her room. Perhaps she would be so kind as to leave an address.

I don’t think so, she had said, and walked to the open door.

Buen viaje, Señora Meyer, the clerk had called as she was getting into the airport taxi.

8

When she landed on the island at one-thirty on the afternoon of July 2 the sky was dark with clouds and the runway already swamped with the rain that would fall intermittently for the next week. The Costa Rican pilot had mentioned this possibility. “A few bands of showers that will never dampen the spirit of any vacationer,” was how the pilot had put it in his English-language update from the front cabin. It had occurred to Elena as she sheltered the unfamiliar passport under her T-shirt and made a run for the terminal that these bands of showers would not in fact dampen the spirit of any vacationer, since there did not seem to be any vacationer in sight.

No golf bag, no tennis racket, no sunburned child in tow.

No anxious traveler with four overstuffed tote bags and one boarding pass for the six-seater hop to the more desirable island.

There did not even seem to be any airport employee in sight.

Only the half-dozen young men, wearing the short-sleeved uniforms of what seemed to be some kind of local military police, lounging just inside the closed glass doors to the terminal.

She had stopped, rain streaming down her face, waiting for the doors to slide open automatically.

When the doors did not open she had knocked on the glass.

After what seemed a considerable length of time, once she had been joined outside the glass door by the crew from her flight, one of the men inside had detached himself from the others and inserted a key to open the door.

Thank you, she had said.

Move on, he had said.

She had moved on.

Gate after gate was unlit. The moving sidewalks were not moving, the baggage carousels were silent. Metal grilles had been lowered over the doors to the coffee bars and concessions, even the shop that promised OPEN 24 HOURS DUTY-FREE. She had steeled herself on the plane to make direct eye contact when she went through immigration but the lone immigration official had examined the passport without interest, stamped it, and handed it back to her, never meeting her eyes.

“Where you stay,” he had said, pen poised to complete whatever form required this information.

She had tried to think of a plausible answer.

“You mean while I’m here,” she had said, stalling. “You mean what hotel.”

“Correct, correct, what hotel.” He was bored, impatient. “Ramada, Royal Caribe, Intercon, what.”

“Ramada,” she had said.

She had gotten a taxi for the Ramada and then, once the doors were closed, told the driver that she had changed her mind and wanted to go to the Intercon. She had registered at the Intercon as Elise Meyer. As soon as she got upstairs she called Barry Sedlow’s beeper and left the number of the hotel.

Twenty minutes later the telephone had rung.

She had picked it up but said nothing.

So far so good, Barry Sedlow said. You’re where you should be.

She thought about this.

She had left the number of the hotel on his beeper but she had not left the number of her room.

To get through to the room he had to know how she was registered.

Had to know that the passport was in the name Elise Meyer.

She said nothing.

Just sit tight, he said. Someone’s going to be in touch.

Still she said nothing.

Losing radio contact, he said. Hel-lo-oh.

There had been a silence.

Okay I get it, he had said finally. You don’t want to talk, don’t talk. But do yourself a favor? Relax. Go down to the pool, tip the boy to set up a chaise, get some sun, order one of those drinks with the cherries and the pineapple and the little umbrellas, you’re there as a tourist, try acting like one, just tell the operator to switch your calls, don’t worry about their finding you, they’re going to find you all right.

She had done this. She had not spoken to Barry Sedlow but she had done what he said to do.

I do not know why (another instance of what “changed” her, what “motivated” her, what made her do it) but she had put down the telephone and waited for a break in the rain and then done exactly what Barry Sedlow said to do.

At four that afternoon and again at noon the next day and again at noon of the day after that, she had bought the local paper and whatever day-old American papers she could find in the coffee shop and gone down to the Intercon pool and tipped the boy to set up a chaise within range of the pool shack telephone. She had sat on the chaise under the gray sky and she had read the newspapers all the way through, one by one, beginning with the local paper and progressing to whatever Miami Herald or New York Times or USA Today had come in that morning. She read on the chaise at the Intercon pool about the dock strike in the Grenadines. She read on the chaise at the Intercon pool about the demonstration in Pointe-à-Pitre to protest the arrest of the leader of the independence movement. She read in a week-old USA Today about the effect of fish oil on infertile pandas in distant zoos. The only stories she avoided outright, there on the chaise at the Intercon pool, were those having to do with the campaign. She moved past any story having to do with the campaign. She preferred stories having to do with natural forces, stories about new evidence of reef erosion in the Maldives, say, or recently released research on the deep cold Pacific welling of El Niño.

About unusual movements of wind charted off the coast of Africa.

About controversial data predicting the probability of earthquakes measuring over 5.5 Richter.

American, the pool boy had said when she tipped him the first day with an American dollar. Whole lot of Americans coming in.

Really, she had said, by way of closing the conversation.

Good for business, he had said, by way of reopening it.

She had looked around the empty pool, the unused chaises stacked against the shack. I guess they don’t swim much, she had said.

He had giggled and slapped his thigh with a towel. Do not swim much, he said finally. No.

By the third day she had herself begun noticing the Americans. Several in the coffee shop the night before, all men. Several more in the lobby, laughing together as they stood at the entrance waiting to get into an unmarked armored van.

The van had CD plates.

Swear to Christ, that deal in Chalatenango, I did something like three and a half full clips, one of the Americans had said.

Shit, another had said. You know the difference between one of them and a vampire? You drive a stake through a vampire’s heart, the fucker dies.

No Americans at the pool.

Until now.

She had become aware as she was reading the local paper that one of the men she had seen waiting to get into the van with the CD plates was standing between her chaise and the pool, blocking the tiled walkway, smoking a cigarette as he surveyed the otherwise empty pool area.

His back was to her.

His warm-up jacket was lettered 25TH DIVISION TROPIC LIGHTNING.

She realized that she was reading for the third time the same follow-up on a rash of thefts and carjackings in the immediate vicinity of Cyril E. King International Airport on St. Thomas.

Excuse me, she said. Do you know what time it is.

He flicked his cigarette in the direction of the clock over the pool shack counter.

The clock read 1:10.

She put down the local paper and picked up the Miami Herald.

She continued reading the Miami Herald until she reached page sixteen of the B section.

Page sixteen of the B section of the July 2 Miami Herald, two days late.

McMAHON, Richard Allen: age 74, died under care of physician June 30, 1984, at Clearview Convalescent Lodge, South Kendall. No services are scheduled.

She folded the newspaper, got up from the chaise and edged her way past the American in the warm-up jacket.

Pardon me, he said. Ma’am.

Excuse me, she said.

Outside the hotel she got a taxi and told the driver to take her to the American embassy. The “little business” (as she thought of it) at the main embassy gate took ten minutes. The “kind of spooky coincidence” (as she thought of it) or “incident” (as it immediately became known) at the embassy picnic took another ten minutes. When she got back to her room at the Intercon at approximately two-thirty on the afternoon of July 4 she wrote two letters, one to Catherine and one to Wynn Janklow, which she took to an air express office to be shipped for delivery the next day in the United States. Sweet bird, the letter to Catherine began. She had spoken to Catherine twice from San José and again the evening she arrived on the island but the calls had been unsatisfactory and now she could not reach her.

Tried to call you a few minutes ago but you had signed out to go to Cape Ann with Francie and her parents — didn’t know how to reach you and there are two things I need you to know right away. The first thing I need you to know is that I’m asking your father to pick you up and bring you to Malibu for a while. Just until I get back from this trip. You don’t need summer credits anyway and he can probably arrange a way you can do the S.A.T. prep out there. The second thing I need you to know is I love you. Sometimes we argue about things but I think we both know I only argue because I want your life to be happy and good. Want you not to waste your time. Not to waste your talents. Not to let who you are get mixed up with anybody else’s idea of who you should be.

I love you the most. XXXXXXXX, M.

P.S. If anyone else comes and wants to take you from school for any reason repeat ANY REASON do not repeat DO NOT go with him or her.

The letter to Wynn Janklow was short, because she had reached him, at the house in Malibu, as soon as she got back from the embassy. She had placed the call from a pay phone in the Intercon lobby. Had he not answered the phone she would have waited in the lobby until he did, because she needed to talk to Wynn before chancing any situation (the elevator, say, or the corridor upstairs) in which she might be alone.

Any situation in which something might happen to prevent her from telling Wynn what it was she wanted him to do.

Wynn had answered the phone.

Wynn had told her that he had just walked in off a flight from Taipei.

She had told Wynn what it was she wanted him to do.

She had not mentioned the kind of spooky coincidence at the embassy picnic.

My understanding is that Dick McMahon will not be a problem, she had heard the familiar but unplaceable voice say at the embassy picnic.

The steel band that was playing Sousa marches had momentarily fallen silent and the familiar but unplaceable voice had carried across the tent.

Deek McMaa-aan was the way the familiar voice pronounced the name. My understanding is that Deek McMaa-aan will not be a problem.

She had not placed the voice until she saw the Salvadoran across the tent.

Here is my concern, she remembered the Salvadoran saying in the Pan Am lounge at the Miami airport as he fingered the envelope Barry Sedlow had slipped him. We have a little problem here.

Transit passenger, she remembered Barry Sedlow saying in the car just after he shot out the streetlight with the 9mm Browning. Already on the six-thirty back to San Sal. Not our deal.

The Salvadoran was the kind of spooky coincidence.

The Salvadoran was why she called Wynn.

The Salvadoran was why she tried to call Catherine.

The Salvadoran was why she wrote the letters and took them to the air express office for next-day delivery to Catherine and to Wynn.

The Salvadoran was why she went from the air express office to a local office of the Bank of America, where she obtained eleven thousand dollars in cash, the sum of the cash available on Elena McMahon’s various credit cards.

The Salvadoran was why she then destroyed the cards.

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

Not our deal, Barry Sedlow had said, but it was.

She wrote the letters and she arranged for Wynn to take care of Catherine and she got the eleven thousand dollars in cash and she destroyed the credit cards because she had no way of knowing what kind of problem Dick McMahon’s daughter might be seen to be.

Half a generation after the fact, from where I sit at my desk in an apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan, it would be easy to conclude that Elena’s actions that afternoon did not entirely make sense, easy to assume that at some point in the hour between learning her father was dead and seeing the Salvadoran she had cracked, panicked, gone feral, a trapped animal trying to hide her young and stay alert in the wild, awake in the ether, alive on the ground.

All I can tell you is what she did.

All I can tell you is that at that time in that place there was a logic to what she did.

Wynn, the second of the two letters she wrote that afternoon read.

What I couldn’t tell you on the phone was that something bad is happening. I don’t know what it is. So please please do this one thing for me.

P.S., the postscript read.

You have to pick her up yourself. I mean don’t send Rudich.

Rudich was someone who had worked for Wynn’s father and now worked for Wynn. Rudich was who did things for Wynn. Rudich had a first name but no one ever used it and she had forgotten it. Rudich was who Wynn would call if he needed somebody to fly to Wyoming to take a ranch out of escrow. Rudich was who Wynn would send if he needed somebody to deliver a contract in person the next morning in Tokyo. Rudich was probably who now called the caterer to lay on the tennis lunches.

Rudich could do anything but Rudich could not do this one thing she needed done.

Please please do this.

Love. Still. E.

9

The last time I was in Los Angeles I made a point of going to see Wynn Janklow.

“Why not come by the house Sunday,” he had said on the telephone. “I’m having some people, we’ll talk, bring a racket.”

I made an excuse to go instead to his office in Century City.

I admired, at his prompting, the photographs taken a few months before at Catherine’s wedding.

“Big blowout,” he said. “Under the huppah on the beach at sunset, I flew Bobby Short out to play during dinner, then two bands and fireworks, I’m still finding champagne glasses in the shrubbery but what the hell, great kids, both of them.”

I appreciated, again at his prompting, the view of Catalina from his office windows, the clarity of the atmosphere in spite of what he referred to as “all this enviro-freak sky-is-falling shit which as God is my witness I hear even from people I call my friends.”

I waited until the secretary had brought in the requisite silver tray with the requisite folded linen napkin, the requisite two bottles of Evian, the requisite Baccarat tumblers.

Only when the secretary had left the room and closed the door did I ask Wynn Janklow to try to remember what he had thought when he received first the call and one day later this letter from Elena.

He had furrowed his brow for my benefit. “That would have been, let me think, when.”

Nineteen eighty-four, I said. July 1984.

Wynn Janklow swiveled his chair and gazed out the window, squinting, as if 1984 might materialize just off Catalina.

No big deal, he said then. As he remembered he had to be in New York that week anyway, he flew into Logan instead, got a car to take him down to Newport, he and Catherine had been in New York by midnight.

Big killer heat wave, he remembered.

You know the kind.

The kind where you step out of the car onto the street and you sink into the asphalt and if you don’t move fast you’re methane.

He remembered he had Catherine call Elena that night, report she was scarfing Maine lobster in the Hollywood Suite at the Regency.

Great kid even then. Always a great kid.

True enough, on the money, now that I mentioned it there had been some trick about calling Elena, the hotel didn’t have her registered right, you had to ask for somebody else, she had given him the name when she called and he had given the name to Catherine.

Elise Meyer, I said.

Elise Meyer, he repeated. No problem, he was glad to be able to do what Elena wanted.

He had been here and Elena had been there but no problem, they stayed on good terms, they had this great kid after all, plus they were adults, unlike some people who got separated or divorced or whatever he and Elena had always maintained a very civilized kind of relationship.

True enough, again on the money, her call had seemed maybe a little overwrought.

Fourth of July, he was just off the plane from Taipei, thinking he’d play a little tennis, work off the jet lag before he had to be in New York.

And then this call from Elena.

Whoa, hold on, he remembered saying. So something happened at the embassy, some clerk gave you the runaround, let me make a few calls, shoot a rocket up the fucker’s fat ass.

You don’t understand, he remembered Elena saying.

You have to be here to understand, he remembered Elena saying.

Wynn Janklow had again gazed out the window. “End of sad story,” he said.

There had been a silence.

“The sad story is what,” I said finally. “You think Elena might have been right? Is that the sad story?” I tried for a neutral tone, a therapist guiding the client back. I wanted to see him confront that hour during which Elena had gone feral. “You think maybe you did have to be there to understand?”

He did not at first respond.

“Maybe you noticed this gadget I have on the wall there,” he said then.

He got up and walked to an electronic Mercator projection mounted on the wall, one of those devices on which it is possible to read the time anywhere in the world by watching part of the map pass into darkness as another part emerges into daylight.

“You can watch the sun rise and set anyplace you want,” he said. “Right here. Standing right here looking at this.” He jabbed at the map with an index finger. “But it doesn’t tell you shit about what’s happening there.”

He sat down behind his desk.

He picked up a paperweight, then buzzed an intercom.

“It’s just a toy,” he said then. “Frankly it’s just something I use when I’m making calls, I look over there and I can see at a glance who’s likely to be awake. Meaning I can call them.”

He had again buzzed the intercom.

“And in all fairness, I have to admit, sometimes they’re awake and sometimes they aren’t.” He had looked up with relief as the secretary opened the door. “If you could locate a few stamps for her parking ticket, Raina, I’ll walk our guest downstairs.”

10

Of course Elena might have been right.

Of course you had to be there to understand. Of course, had you not been there, it might have seemed a definite stretch to call what happened at the embassy Fourth of July picnic an “incident.”

Of course, had you not been there, what happened at the embassy Fourth of July picnic might have suggested not an “incident” but merely that it was time to make a few calls, shoot a few rockets up a few fat asses.

“The incident” was what Alex Brokaw called it when he suggested to his DCM that it might be useful to run a background on Elise Meyer. “I’ll have to excuse myself to follow up on a little incident,” was what the DCM said by way of cutting short a conversation with the Brown & Root project manager who had just arrived to supervise the hardening of the perimeter around the residence. “Just crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s on a rather troubling incident we had here,” was what the DCM said when he put through the request for the background on Elise Meyer.

This was the rather troubling incident in its entirety:

“I’m an American citizen and I need to speak to a consular officer,” Elena McMahon had said when she walked into the tented area reserved for the embassy picnic.

The traditional Fourth of July picnic held by every American embassy and open to any American citizen who happens to be in the vicinity.

The Fourth of July embassy picnic that must have seemed, given a country in which any American citizen who happened to be in the vicinity happened also to be in the official or covert employ of one or another branch of the embassy, a trying tradition at best.

She needed, she had said, to replace a lost passport.

She did not want to interrupt the picnic, she had said, but she had gone to the consulate and the guard at the gate said the consulate was closed for the holiday, and she needed her passport replaced immediately.

She needed her passport replaced immediately because she needed to return to the United States immediately.

The woman had seemed, according to the consular officer who was finally located to deal with her, “a little confused,” and “unable or unwilling” to accept his “offer to try to clear up the confusion.”

The confusion of course was that this woman already had her passport.

Her presence inside the tented area was proof that she already had her passport.

The confusion with this woman had begun at the gate.

She had also told the marine on duty at the gate that she had lost her passport, and when he told her to return the next morning when the consular office reopened she had insisted that tomorrow would be too late, she needed to see a consular officer now.

The marine had explained that this would be impossible because all the consular officers were at the Fourth of July picnic.

The Fourth of July picnic that unfortunately she could not attend because guests were required to present an American passport.

At which point this woman had produced her passport.

And left it, as any other guest not known to the embassy would have left his or her passport, with the guard at the entrance to the tented area.

This woman had left her passport and signed the embassy guest book.

There it was, he could show it to her, her signature: Elise Meyer.

Here it was, the guard could and would return it to her, her passport: Elise Meyer.

That was the confusion.

According to the consular officer she had taken the passport and held it out, as if she were about to show or give it to him. There had been a moment of silence before she spoke. “This was just to get me in because I need to explain something,” she had said, and then she had fallen silent.

She had been looking across the tent.

The steel band had stopped playing.

The woman had seemed, the consular officer reported, “very interested in some of our Salvadoran friends.”

“Neat idea, by the way, the steel band,” the consular officer had added, “but next year it might be appropriate to tell them, ‘Rule Britannia’ isn’t ours.”

It was at the point when the steel band struck up “Rule Britannia” that the woman had put the passport in her bag, closed the bag, and walked out of the tent and across the lawn and out the gate.

“You were about to explain something,” the consular officer had said as she started to walk away.

“Forget it,” she had said without turning back.

That was the reason for ordering the background.

The background that was ordered to get a line on who she was and what she was doing there.

The background that threw up the glitch.

The background that turned up flat.

No history.

The passport bearing the name Elise Meyer showed that it had been issued on June 30 1984 at the United States Passport Agency in Miami, but the United States Passport Agency in Miami reported no record of having issued a passport in the name Elise Meyer.

That was the glitch.

11

The young FBI agent who had flown down from the Miami office had opened the initial interview by mentioning the glitch.

She had looked puzzled.

The discrepancy, the anomaly, whatever she wanted to call it.

He was certain that she could clear this immediately.

He was sure that she would have a simple explanation for the glitch.

The anomaly.

The discrepancy.

She had offered no explanation at all.

She had merely shrugged. “At my age I don’t actually find discrepancies too surprising,” she had said. “You must be what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

He was twenty-five.

He had decided to try another tack.

“Assuming for the moment that someone provided you with apparently inauthentic documentation,” he began.

“You’re assuming that,” she said. “Naturally. Because you haven’t had a whole lot of experience with the way things work. You still think things work the way they’re supposed to work. I’m assuming something more along the lines of business as usual.”

“Excuse me?”

“I guess you must work in an office where nobody ever makes a mistake,” she said. “I guess where you work nobody ever hits the wrong key because they’re in a rush to go on break.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“You don’t think it’s possible that some low-level GS-whatever in the passport office accidentally deleted my record?”

This was in fact a distinct possibility, but he chose to ignore it. “Apparently inauthentic documentation is sometimes provided for the purpose of placing the carrier in a position where they can be blackmailed into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do.”

“Is that something you learned at Quantico?”

He ignored this. “In other words,” he repeated, “someone could have placed you in such a position.” He paused for emphasis. “Someone could be using you.”

“For what,” she said.

“If there were a plot,” the agent said.

“That’s your invention. This whole plot business. Your movie. Not anybody else’s.”

The agent paused. She had agreed to the interview. She had not been uncooperative. Because she had not been uncooperative he let this pass, but what she had said was not entirely accurate. The plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw was not his invention at all. There were various theories around the embassy and also in Miami about whose invention it was, the most popular of which was that Alex Brokaw himself had engineered the report in an effort to derail a certain two-track approach then favored at State, but the existence of a plot, once it was mentioned by what the cable traffic called “a previously reliable source,” had to be accepted at face value. Documentable steps had to be taken. The record at State had to duly show the formation of a crisis management team on the Caribbean desk. The paperwork had to duly show that wall maps had been requisitioned, with colored pins to indicate known players. The concertina perimeter around the embassy overflow office structures had to be duly reinforced. On the record. All AM/EMBASSY dependents and nonessential personnel had to be duly encouraged to take home leave. In triplicate. All American citizens with access to AM/EMBASSY personnel and uncleared backgrounds had to be interviewed.

Duly.

Including this one.

This one had access to AM/EMBASSY personnel by virtue of being on the island.

This one had thrown a glitch.

Something about this one’s use of the phrase “your movie” bothered him but he let that go too.

“If there were a plot,” he repeated, “someone could be using you.”

“Those are your words.”

In the silence that followed the young man had clicked his ballpoint pen on the table. There were other things about this one that bothered him, but it was important to keep what bothered him out of this picture. It was possible they might be experiencing a syntactical problem, a misunderstanding that could be cleared up by restatement. “Why not put it in your own words,” he said finally.

She fished a loose cigarette from her pocket and then, when he made the error of interpreting this as an encouraging sign, replaced the cigarette in her pocket, ignoring the match he was still fumbling to strike.

“There could be a game in there somewhere,” she had said then. “And I could be in there somewhere.”

“In the plot.”

“In the game.”

The agent said nothing.

“In whatever you want to call it,” she said then. “It’s your movie.”

“Let’s approach this from another angle,” he said after a silence. “You came here from San José. Costa Rica. Yet no record exists showing you ever entered Costa Rica. So let’s start there.”

“You want to know how I got into Costa Rica.” Her voice had again suggested cooperation.

“Exactly.”

“You don’t even need a passport to enter Costa Rica. An American citizen can enter Costa Rica on a tourist card. From a travel agency.”

“But you didn’t.”

There had been another silence.

“I’m going to say something,” she said then. “You’re going to get it or you won’t. I haven’t been here long, but I’ve been here long enough to notice a lot of Americans here. I notice them on the street, I notice them at the hotel, I notice them all over. I don’t know if they have their own passports. I don’t know whose passports they have. I don’t know whose passport I have. All I know is, they aren’t on vacation.”

Again she took the loose cigarette from her pocket and again she put it back.

“So I’d suggest you just think for a while about what they’re doing here,” she had said then. “And I bet you could pretty much figure how I got into Costa Rica.”

Subject “Elise Meyer” acknowledges entering country in possession of apparently inauthentic documentation but provides no further information concerning either the source of said documentation or her purpose in entering said country, the agent’s preliminary report read. Recommendation: continued surveillance and investigation until such time as identity of subject can be verified, as well as subject’s purpose in entering said country.

This initial interview took place on July 10 1984.

A second interview, during which subject and interrogator reiterated their respective points, took place on July 11 1984.

Elena McMahon moved from the Intercon to the Surf rider on July 12.

It was August 14 when Treat Morrison flew down from Washington on the American that landed at ten a.m. and, when he stopped by the Intercon to leave his bag, happened to see her sitting by herself in the Intercon coffee shop.

Sitting by herself at the round table set for eight.

Wearing the white dress.

Eating the chocolate parfait and bacon.

When he got to the embassy later that day he learned from Alex Brokaw’s DCM that the woman he had seen in the Intercon coffee shop had arrived on the island on July 2 on an apparently falsified American passport issued in the name Elise Meyer. At his request the DCM had arranged to have him briefed on the progress of the continuing FBI investigation meant to ascertain who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there. Later it occurred to him that there would have been at that time in that embassy certain people who already knew who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there, but it did not occur to him then.