There had been nothing out of the ordinary about seeing the man on the bluff.
Nothing at all.
Nothing about the man on the bluff to signal an official presence, nothing to suggest someone who by recognizing him could place her beyond his protection.
Nothing.
He had already been able to see her on the beach.
She had been wearing the same white dress she was wearing in the Intercon coffee shop.
She had been looking out across the tidal flat.
She had been watching the bioluminescence on the water out by the reef.
The man on the bluff had been leaning over, tying his shoe, his face obscured.
There was a full moon but the man’s face had been obscured.
That the man’s face had been obscured was of course something that did not occur to Treat Morrison until after the fact, by which time the man on the bluff was beside the point, since it had been immediately and incontrovertibly established, according to both the FBI and the local police, who had coincidentally been staking out the Aero Sands all that week on an unrelated drug matter, that the man on the bluff, if indeed there had been a man on the bluff, was not the would-be assassin.
The reason this had been immediately and incontrovertibly established was that the local police who had been so fortuitously on hand had managed to kill the would-be assassin right there on the beach, her white dress red with blood before her clip was even emptied.
What bothered Treat Morrison most was not just the man on the bluff.
What bothered him more, what had begun to bother him even as the anesthesiologist was telling him to count backward from one hundred, what was bothering him so much by the time he was alone in the private room at Jackson Memorial that the doctor ordered sedation added to his IV line, was that over the preceding nine days he had checked out the Aero Sands at many different times of day and night, from every possible angle and with every possible eventuality in mind, and he did not recall having at any point during that week seen the local police.
Who had been so fortuitously on hand.
Suggesting that they had not been there at all.
Suggesting that if they had been there at all they had been there only at a certain moment, only at the moment they were needed.
A conclusion that could lead nowhere, since Elena McMahon was already dead.
I mean you could add it up but where does it get you.
This was Treat Morrison’s last word on the subject.
I mean it’s not going to bring her back.
5
AMERICAN IMPLICATED IN ATTEMPTED ASSASSINATION was the headline on the first AP story as it ran in the Miami Herald, the only paper in which I initially had occasion to see it. I recall reading it in the elevator of the hospital where Treat Morrison had finally been stabilized for the flight to Miami. It was that morning’s Herald, impossible to come by down there except at the embassy, abandoned in the waiting room by Alex Brokaw’s DCM when the helicopter arrived to take Treat Morrison to the airport.
Colonel Álvaro García Steiner had also been in the waiting room, watching warily from a sagging sofa as the local police spokesman was interviewed by a San Juan television channel.
The paper was lying on a molded plastic chair and was folded open to this story.
As I picked it up I happened to look out the window behind Colonel Álvaro García Steiner and see the helicopter, just lifting off the lawn.
I walked to the elevator and got on it and started to read the story as the elevator descended.
The elevator had stopped to pick someone up on the third floor when I hit the name of the American implicated in the attempted assassination.
Academy Award night, two and a half years before.
Was the last time I saw her.
Said to have been using the name Elise Meyer.
Embassy sources confirmed however that her actual name was Elena McMahon.
Reports that the suspected assassin had been supplying arms and other aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua remain unconfirmed.
Until the next day, when Bob Weir happened to find himself in a position to provide the manifests that detailed the shipments that happened to coincide with weapons recently seized in a raid against a Sandinista arms cache.
Also fortuitously.
Since the manifests confirmed the reports that the suspected assassin had been supplying arms and other aid to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
The reports that had been further corroborated by the discovery of Sandinista literature in two adjoining rooms at the Surfrider Hotel recently vacated by the would-be assassin.
Immediately and incontrovertibly confirmed.
Immediately and incontrovertibly corroborated.
Which of course was the burden of the second AP story.
6
I magine how this went down.
She would have come out of the Aero Sands.
At the certain point just past the pool where it was possible to get a partial view of the path on the bluff she would have glanced up.
She would not have seen Treat Morrison.
She would have passed the woman who pushed the old man in the wheelchair and the baby in the stroller and she would have nodded at the three of them and the baby would have turned to look at her and the old man would have touched his hat and she would have reached the last of the rickety wooden steps onto the beach before she realized that there had been a man on the bluff and that she had seen the man before.
She would have not even consciously registered seeing the man on the bluff, she would have registered only that she had seen him before.
The man on the bluff with the ponytail.
The man at the landing strip in Costa Rica.
I could be overdue a night or two in Josie.
Anyone asks, tell them you’re waiting for Mr. Jones.
You’re doing nothing. What I’m doing doesn’t concern you.
She had not registered seeing him but something about seeing him had slowed motion just perceptibly, twenty-four frames a second now reduced to twenty. The baby had turned too slowly.
As in the hour before our death.
The old man in the wheelchair had lifted his hand to his hat too slowly.
As in the hour before our death.
She did not want to look back but finally she did.
When she heard the shots.
When she saw Treat Morrison fall.
When she saw the man on the bluff turn to her.
You get it one way or you get it another, nobody comes through free.
7
After the two AP stories the story stopped, dropped into a vacuum.
No mention.
Off the screen.
That the intended political consequences never materialized was evidence, in retrospect, that Treat Morrison had not entirely lost his game.
“I mean it was just all wrong,” he said to me. “It would have been just plain bad for the country.”
I suggested that he had not done it for the country.
I suggested that he had done it for her.
He did not look directly at me. “It was just all wrong,” he repeated.
Only once, a year or so later, did Treat Morrison almost break down.