Only in the abstract.
Only until he got down there.
When I called to say-that I was coming down he did not exactly put me off, but neither did he offer undue encouragement.
Actually it was turning out to be kind of a fluid situation, he said on the telephone.
Actually he wasn’t certain how long he’d be there.
Actually if he was there at all, he was going to be pretty much tied up.
Actually we could talk a hell of a lot more productively in Washington.
I decided to break the impasse.
At that time I happened to own a few shares of Morrison Knudsen stock, and it had recently occurred to me, when I received an annual report mentioning Morrison Knudsen’s role in a new landing facility under construction on the island, that this otherwise uninteresting island to which Treat Morrison had so abruptly decamped might be about to become a new Ilopango, a new Palmerola, a staging area for the next transformation of the war we were not fighting.
I looked at the clock, then asked Treat Morrison about the landing facility.
He was silent for exactly seven seconds, the length of time it took him to calculate that I would be more effectively managed if allowed to come down than left on my own reading annual reports.
But hell, he said then. It’s your ticket, it’s a free country, you do what you want.
What I did not know even after I got there was that the reason he had resisted my visit was in this instance not professional but personal. Because by seven o’clock on the evening of the day he arrived, although only certain people at the embassy knew it, Treat Morrison had managed to meet the woman he had seen eight hours before in the Intercon coffee shop. Two hours after that, he knew enough about her situation to place the call to Washington that got the DIA agent down in the morning.
That was the difference between him and the Harvard guys.
He listened.
2
I have no idea what was in her mind when she told him who she was.
Which she flat-out did. Volunteered it.
She was not Elise Meyer, she was Elena McMahon.
She told him that within less than a minute after she went upstairs to his room with him that evening.
Maybe she recognized him from around Washington, maybe she thought he might recognize her from around Washington, maybe she had been feral too long, alert in the wild too long.
Maybe she just looked at him and she trusted him. Because believe me, Elena McMahon had no particular reason, at that particular moment, to tell a perfect stranger, a perfect stranger who had for reasons she did not know approached her in the lobby of the Intercon, what she had not told anyone else.
I mean she had no idea in the world that had she gone to the airport at ten that morning Alex Brokaw would have been dead that night.
Of course Alex Brokaw was at the airport at ten, because he had delayed his weekly flight to San José in order to brief Treat Morrison.
Of course Alex Brokaw was still alive that night, because Dick McMahon’s daughter had not been at the airport.
Of course.
We now know that, but she did not.
I mean she knew nothing.
She did not know that the Salvadoran whose voice she had most recently heard the night before trying to mediate whatever the argument had been between Paul Schuster and Bob Weir was Bob Weir’s old friend from San Salvador, Colonel Álvaro García Steiner.
Deal me out, Paul Schuster had kept saying. Just deal me out.
You have a problem, Bob Weir had kept saying.
There is no problem, the Salvadoran had kept saying.
She did not even know that Paul Schuster had died that morning in his office at the Surfrider. According to the local police, who as it happened were now receiving the same training in counterterrorism from Colonel Álvaro García Steiner that Colonel Álvaro García Steiner had received from the Argentinians, there was no evidence that anyone else had been present in the office in the hours immediately preceding or following the death. Toxicological studies suggested an overdose of secobarbital.
It was late that first day, when he came back to the Intercon from the embassy, that Treat Morrison again noticed the woman he had seen that morning in the coffee shop.
He had been picking up his messages at the reception desk, about to go upstairs.
She had seemed to be pleading with the clerk, trying to get a room.
Nothing for you, the clerk had kept repeating. One hundred and ten percent booked.
I found a place I can move into tomorrow, she had kept repeating. I just need tonight. I just need a closet. I just need a rollaway in an office.
One hundred and ten percent booked.
Of course Treat Morrison intervened.
Of course he told the clerk to double up on one of the USG bookings, let him free up a room for her.
He had more than one reason to free up a USG room for her.
He had every reason to free up a USG room for her.
He already knew that she had arrived on the island on July 2 on an apparently falsified American passport issued in the name Elise Meyer. He had already been briefed on the progress of the continuing FBI investigation meant to ascertain who Elise Meyer was and what she was doing there. It went without saying that he would tell the clerk to free up a room for her. Just as it went without saying that he would suggest a drink in the bar while the clerk worked out the logistics.
She had ordered a Coca-Cola.
He had ordered an Early Times and soda.
She thanked him for his intervention.
She said that she had been staying in a place on the windward side and had been looking all day for a new place, but could not move into the place she wanted until the following day.
So she would be gone tomorrow.
She could promise him that.
No problem, he said.
She said nothing.
In fact she said nothing more until the drinks arrived, had seemed to retreat into herself in a way that reminded him of Diane.
Diane when she was sick.
Not Diane before.
When the drinks arrived she peeled the paper wrapping off a straw and stuck the straw between the ice cubes and, without ever lifting the glass from the table, drained half the Coca-Cola.
He watched this and found himself with nothing to say.
She looked at him.
“My father used to order Early Times,” she said.
He asked if her father was alive.
There had been a silence then.
“I need to talk to you alone,” she had said finally.
I told you.
I have no idea.
Maybe she told him who she was because he ordered Early Times. Maybe she looked at him and saw the fog off the Farallons, maybe he looked at her and saw the hot desert twilight. Maybe they looked at each other and knew that nothing they could do would matter as much as the slightest tremor of the earth, the blind trembling of the Pacific in its bowl, the heavy snows closing the mountain passes, the rattlers in the dry grass, the sharks cruising the deep cold water through the Golden Gate.
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.
Oh yes.
This is a romance after all.
One more romance.
3
I recently tried to talk to Mark Berquist about what happened down there.
I know Mark Berquist slightly, everybody now knows Mark Berquist.
Youngest member of the youngest class ever elected to the United States Senate. The class that hit the ground running, the class that arrived on the Hill lean mean and good to go. Author of Constitutional Coercion: Whose Rights Come First? Maker of waves, reliable antagonist on the Sunday shows, most frequently requested speaker on the twenty-five-thousand-dollar-plus-full-expenses circuit.