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
The 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 Internationaclass="underline" 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.”