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.