The Last Thing He Wanted (18 page)

Which went to the question, as Treat Morrison would elliptically put it in the four hundred and seventy-six pages he committed to the Bancroft Library, 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 had been, he kept repeating, a little distracted.

Had he not been a little distracted, he would have put it together immediately that the report of the plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw had not originated, as Alex Brokaw believed it had, with the previously reliable source who passed it to the embassy. Nor had it originated, as most people in Washington believed it had, with Alex Brokaw.

The report of the plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw had of course originated in Washington.

With Mark Berquist.

Who had passed it to the previously reliable source.

Bob Weir.

Treat Morrison had been that close to it and he had blown it.

He had not been concentrating.

Had he been concentrating, everything else would have fallen into place.

I mean Christ, he said. This isn’t rocket science. This is textbook stuff. A, B, C. One two three.

If you put an assassination plot into play you follow it with an assassination attempt. If you stage an assassination attempt you put somebody out front.

A front, an assassin.

A front with a suitable background.

A front who can be silenced in the assassination attempt.

The assassination attempt which would or would not fail, depending on exactly how unauthorized the fringe elements turn out to be.

A, B, C. One two three.

Night follows day.

Not rocket science.

Had he been concentrating he would have added it up. Or so he was still telling himself.

The very last time we spoke.

6

T
he rhythm common to plots dictates a lull, a period of suspension, a time of lying in wait, a certain number of hours or days or weeks so commonplace as to suggest that the thing might not play out, the ball might not drop. In fact the weeks between the day Elena McMahon learned that her father was dead and the day Treat Morrison arrived on the island seemed on the surface so commonplace that only a certain rigidity in her schedule might have suggested that Elena McMahon was waiting for anything at all. At exactly six-thirty, on each of the mornings before she left the Intercon, she turned on the television set in her room and watched the weather on CNN International: showers over Romania, a front over Chile, the United States reduced to a system of thunderstorms, the marine layer shallowing out over southern California, the world beyond this island turning not slowly but at an inexorable meteorological clip, an overview she found soothing.

The shallowing out of the marine layer over southern California meant that stratus over Malibu would burn off by noon.

Catherine could lie in the sun today.

At no later than ten minutes past seven on each of those mornings she put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and began to walk. She walked five miles, seven miles, ten, however long it took to fill two hours exactly. At no later than ten minutes past nine she had two cups of coffee and one papaya, no more. She spent the two hours between ten and noon downtown, not exactly shopping but allowing herself to be seen, establishing her presence. Her routine did not vary: at the revolving rack outside the big Rexall she would pause each day to inspect the unchanging selection of postcards. Three blocks further she would stop at the harbor, sit on the low wall above the docks and watch the loading or unloading of one or another interisland freighter. After the Rexall and the harbor she inspected the bookstore, the pastry shop, the posters outside the municipal office. Her favorite poster showed a red circle and diagonal slash superimposed on an anopheles mosquito, but no legend to explain how the ban was to be effected.

The afternoons were at first more problematic. For a couple of days she tried sitting out by the Intercon pool, but something about the empty chaises and the unbroken summer overcast, as well as about the occasional appearance of one or another of the Americans who now seemed billeted at the Intercon in force, had made her uneasy. On the third day, in a secondhand bookstore near the medical school, she found an Italian grammar and a used textbook called
General Medicine and Infectious Diseases,
and after that spent allotted hours of each afternoon teaching herself Italian (from two to four) and (between five and seven) the principles of diagnosis and treatment.

After she moved from the Intercon to the windward side of the island she had her job, such as it was: assistant manager at the Surfrider. By the time she was hired there was already not much left to do, but at least she had a desk to arrange, a domain to survey, certain invented duties. There were the menus to be made, the flowers to be arranged. There was the daily run to the airport, in one of the Surfrider’s three battered jeeps, to pick up the papers and mail and drop packages for shipment. On the windward side she had not the Intercon pool with its empty chaises but the sea itself, the oppressive low roar of the surf breaking on the reef and the abrupt stillness at ebb and full tide and the relief of the wind that came up toward dawn, banging the shutters and blowing the curtains and drying the sheets that were by then drenched with sweat.

On the windward side she also had, once the last backpacker moved on, the available and entirely undemanding companionship of the Surfrider manager, an American named Paul Schuster who had first come to the islands as a Pan American steward and had metamorphosed into a raconteur of the tropics with a ready trove of stories about people he had known (he would not say who but she would recognize the names if he told her) and curiosities he had encountered (she would not believe the readiness with which inhibition got shed under the palm trees) and places he had operated on islands up and down the Caribbean.

There had been the guesthouse on Martinique, the discotheque in Gustavia. Great spots but not his kind of spot. His kind of spot had been the ultra-exclusive all-male guesthouse on St. Lucia, total luxe, ten perfect jewel-box suites, only the crème de la crème there,
he would not say who but major operators on Wall Street, the hottest-of-the-hot motion picture agents and executives,
pas de
hustlers. His kind of spot had also been Haiti, but he got scared out of Haiti when dead chickens began showing up on the gate of the place he had there, the first and for all he cared to know the only first-rate gay bathhouse in Port-au-Prince.

He might not be the smartest nelly on the block but hey, when he saw a dead chicken he knew what it meant and when he saw a hint he knew how to take it.

Pas de poulet.

Pas de voodoo.

Pas de Port-au-Prince.

Paul Schuster made frequent reference to his own and other people’s homosexuality, but during the time Elena had been at the Surfrider there had been what might have seemed in retrospect a slightly off-key absence of evidence of this, no special friend, no boys who came or went, in fact no one who came or went or stayed, only the two of them, alone at meals and in the evening hours when they sat out by the drained pool and burned citronella sticks against the mosquitoes. Until the night before Treat Morrison arrived, Paul Schuster had been unflaggingly convivial, in a curiously dated style, as if he had washed up down here in the vicinity of 1952 and remained uncontaminated by the intervening decades.

“Happy hour,” he would cry, materializing with a pitcher of rum punch on a porch where she was reading
General Medicine and Infectious Diseases.
“Chug-a-lug. Party time.”

She would reluctantly mark her place and set aside
General Medicine and Infectious Diseases.

Paul Schuster would again describe the scheme he had to redecorate and remarket the Surfrider as an ultra-luxe spa for European businessmen.

Top guys. Heavy hitters. Men of a certain class who may not be able to find full relaxation in Düsseldorf or wherever.

She would again say that she was not at all certain that the mood on the island at this very moment exactly lent itself to remarketing the Surfrider.

He would again ignore this.

“Here I go again,” he would say. “Spilling my ideas like seed.” This was a simile that never failed to please him. “Spilling my seed out where anybody in the world can lap it up. But hey, ideas are like buses, anybody can take one.”

The one evening Paul Schuster was not unflaggingly convivial was that of August 13, which happened also to be the one evening he had invited a guest to dinner.

“By the way, I told Evelina we’ll be three tonight,” he had said when she came back from her morning trip to the airport. Evelina was the one remaining member of the kitchen staff, a dour woman who more or less stayed on because she and her grandchildren lived rent-free in a cottage behind the laundry. “I have a chum coming by, somebody you should know.”

She had asked who.

“Kind of a famous restaurateur here,” Paul Schuster had said.

When she came downstairs not long after seven Elena could see Paul Schuster and an older man sitting outside by the empty pool, but because the two seemed locked in intense conversation she picked up a magazine on the screened porch, where Evelina was already setting the table.

“Stop hiding in there.” Paul Schuster’s voice was imperious. “I want you to meet our guest.”

As she walked outside the older man had half risen, the barest gesture, then sunk back into his chair, a rather ghostly apparition in espadrilles and unpressed khaki pants and a black silk shirt buttoned up to the neck.

“Enchanté,”
he had murmured, in a gravelly but clearly American accent. “Bob Weir.”

“I’m frankly surprised you haven’t run into Bob before,” Paul Schuster said, a slight edge in his voice. “Bob makes it his business to run into everybody. That’s how he could turn up here one morning and by dinner he’s the best-known American on the island.” Paul Schuster snapped his fingers. “He was at it before he even cleared customs. Running into people. Wouldn’t you say that was the secret of your success, Bob?”

“Make your point, don’t do it the hard way,” Bob Weir said.

In the silence that followed, Elena had heard herself asking Bob Weir how long he had been here.

He had considered this. “A while now,” he said finally.

There was another silence.

She was about to ask him about his restaurant when he suddenly spoke. “I believe I saw you at the airport this morning,” he said.

She said that she was at the airport every morning.

“That’s good,” Bob Weir said.

This enigmatic pronouncement hung in the air between them.

She noticed that Paul Schuster was leaning slightly forward, tensed, transfixed.

“I don’t know that it’s
good
exactly,” she said finally, trying for a little silvery laugh, a Westlake Mom tone. “It’s just part of my job.”

“It’s good,” Bob Weir said. “Because you can take Paul with you tomorrow. Paul has something to do at the airport tomorrow morning.”

“Oh no I don’t,” Paul Schuster said. It seemed to Elena that he had physically recoiled. “Uh uh. I don’t go to the airport.”

“At ten.” Bob Weir addressed this to Elena as if Paul Schuster had not spoken. “Paul needs to be there at ten.”

“I do
not
need to be there at ten,” Paul Schuster said.

“We can be there whenever you want,” Elena said, conciliatory.

“Paul needs to be there at ten,” Bob Weir repeated.

“Let me just lay one or two home truths on the table,” Paul Schuster said to Bob Weir.
“Paul
doesn’t need to be there at all.
She’ll
be there if and when I tell her to be there. And believe me, there’s still a big
if
in this situation, and the big
if
is
moi.
” Paul Schuster snatched up the empty pitcher of rum punch. “And
if
she’s there, you know who’ll be there with her? Nobody.
Nul.
Period. Now let’s just change the subject. We’re out of punch. Get Evelina out here.”

Elena stood up and started toward the porch.

“In my personal view you don’t have as many home truths in your deck as you think you do,” she heard Bob Weir say to Paul Schuster.

“What do I see on that porch,” she heard Paul Schuster say, an accusation. “Do I see that Evelina has already set the table?”

Elena stopped. The hour at which dinner was served, meaning the hour at which Evelina would be free to go back to the cottage with her grandchildren, had become during the preceding week a minor irritation to Paul Schuster, but he had not before made an issue of it. It occurred to her that she could be witnessing some form of homosexual panic, that Bob Weir might know something that Paul Schuster did not want him to know.

“Evelina,” he called. “Get out here.”

Evelina had appeared, her face impassive.

“I sincerely hope you’re not planning to foist dinner on us before eight-thirty exactly.”

Evelina had stood there.

“And if you’re about to tell me as usual the fish will dry out by eight-thirty,” Paul Schuster said, “then let me cut this short.
Don’t bring it out at all. Forget the fish. Pas de poisson.”

Evelina’s eyes flickered from Paul Schuster to Elena.

“Don’t look to
her,”
Paul Schuster said. “She just works here. She’s just one of the help. Same as you used to be.” Paul Schuster picked up the empty pitcher and handed it to Evelina. “If you would be good enough to refill this pitcher,” he said as he started inside, “I’ll call into town for the truck.”

Evelina was halfway into the kitchen before she asked why the truck.

“Because I want you and your bastard brats out of here tonight,” Paul Schuster said, and let the door bang behind him.

Elena closed her eyes and tried to breathe deeply enough to relax the knot in her stomach. She could hear Paul Schuster inside, singing snatches from
Carousel.
In a locked rattan cabinet in his office he kept original-cast recordings of a number of Broadway musicals, worn LPs in mildewed sleeves, so scratched by now that he rarely played them but frequently sang them, particularly the lesser-known transitions, doing all the parts.