The Last Thing He Wanted (6 page)

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

I
t 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

T
he 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.