Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

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.

At three o’clock the restaurant had emptied out and Barry Sedlow had not appeared. From a pay phone in the lobby she dialed the 800 number Barry Sedlow had given her and found that it was a beeper. She punched in the number of the pay phone in the Omni lobby but at four o’clock, when the phone had not rung, she left.

At midnight the phone rang in the house in Sweetwater.

Elena hesitated, then picked it up.

“You stood out,” Barry Sedlow said. “You let yourself be noticed.”

“Noticed by who?”

He did not respond directly. “Here’s what you’re going to want to do.”

What she was going to want to do, he said, was walk into the Pan Am Clipper Club at the Miami airport the next day at noon sharp. What she was going to want to do was go to the desk and ask for Michelle. She was going to want to tell Michelle that she was meeting Gary Barnett.

“Who exactly is Gary Barnett,” she said.

“Michelle’s the blonde, not the spic. Make sure it’s Michelle you talk to. The spic is Adele, Adele doesn’t know me.”

“Gary Barnett is you?”

“Just do it my way for a change.”

She had done it his way.

Gary wants you to make yourself comfortable, Michelle had said.

If I could please see your Clipper Club card, Adele had said.

Michelle had rolled her eyes. I saw her card, Michelle had said.

Elena sat down. On a corner sofa a portly man in a silk suit was talking on the telephone, his voice rising and falling, an unbroken flow of English and Spanish, now imploring, now threatening, oblivious to the announcements of flights for Guayaquil and Panama and Guatemala, oblivious to Elena, oblivious even to the woman at his side, who was thin and gray-haired and wore a cashmere cardigan and expensive walking shoes.

Mr. Lee, the man kept saying.

Then, finally: Let me ask you one question, Mr. Lee. Do we have the sugar or don’t we. All right then. You tell me we have it. Then explain to me this one thing. How do we prove we have it. Because believe me, Mr. Lee, we are losing credibility with the buyer. All right. Listen. Here is the situation. We have ninety-two million dollars tied up since Thursday. This is Tuesday. Believe me, ninety-two million dollars is not small change. Is not chicken shit, Mr. Lee. The telex was supposed to be sent on Friday. I come up from San Salvador this morning to close the deal, the Sun Bank in Miami is supposed to have the telex, the Sun Bank in Miami does not have the telex. Now I ask you, Mr. Lee. Please. What am I supposed to do?

The man slammed down the phone.

The gray-haired woman took a San Salvador newspaper from her Vuitton tote and began reading it.

The man stared balefully at Elena.

Elena shifted her gaze, a hedge against the possibility that eye contact could be construed as standing out. Across the room a steward was watching General Hospital on the television set above the bar.

She heard the man again punching numbers into the telephone but did not look at him.

Mr. Lee, the man said.

A silence.

Elena allowed her eyes to wander. The headline on the paper the woman was reading was GOBIERNO VENDE 85 % LECHE DONADA.

All right, the man said. You are not Mr. Lee. My mistake. But if you are truly the son you are also Mr. Lee. So let me speak to your father, Mr. Lee. What is this, he cannot come to the phone? I am talking to him, he tells me to call back in ten minutes. I am calling back from a pay phone in the Miami airport and he cannot take the call? What is this? Mr. Lee. Please. I am getting from you both a bunch of lies. A bunch of misinformation. Disinformation. Lies. Mr. Lee. Listen to me. It costs me maybe a million dollars to put you and your father out of business, believe me, I will spend it.

Again the phone was slammed down.

GOBIERNO VENDE 85 % LECHE DONADA. The government sells eighty-five percent of donated milk. It struck Elena that her Spanish must have failed, this was too broad to be an accurate translation.

Elena did not yet know how broad a story could get.

Again the man punched in numbers. Mr. Elman. Let me tell you the situation here. I am calling from a pay phone in the Miami airport. I fly up from San Salvador today. Because today the deal was to close. Today the Sun Bank in Miami would have the telex to approve the line of credit. Today the Sun Bank in Miami does not have the telex. Today I am sitting in the Miami airport and I don’t know what to do. That is the situation here. Okay, Mr. Elman. We have a little problem here, which I’m sure we can solve.

The calls continued. Mr. Lee. Mr. Elman. Mr. Gordon. Someone was in Toronto and someone else was in Los Angeles and many people were in Miami. At four o’clock Elena heard the door buzz. At the moment she allowed herself to look up she saw Barry Sedlow, without breaking stride as he walked toward her, lay an envelope on the table next to the telephone the Salvadoran was using.

“Here is my concern,” the Salvadoran was saying into the telephone as he fingered the envelope. “Mr. Elman. You and I, we have confianza.” The Salvadoran placed the envelope in an inner pocket of his silk jacket. “But what I am being fed from Mr. Lee is a bunch of disinformation.”

Later in Barry Sedlow’s car on the way to Hialeah she had asked who the Salvadoran was.

“What made you think he was Salvadoran,” Barry Sedlow said.

She told him.

“Lot of people say they came up from San Salvador this morning, lot of people read Salvadoran papers, that doesn’t make them Salvadoran.”

She asked what the man was if not Salvadoran.

“I didn’t say he wasn’t Salvadoran,” Barry Sedlow said. “Did I. You have a bad habit of jumping to conclusions.” In the silence that followed he slowed to a stop at an intersection, reached inside the Dolphins warm-up jacket he was wearing and took aim at the streetlight.

One thing she had learned growing up around her father: she recognized guns.

The gun Barry Sedlow had taken from inside his warm-up jacket was a 9mm Browning with sound suppressor.

The engine was idling and the sound of the silenced shot inaudible.

The light shattered and the intersection went dark.

“Transit passenger,” Barry Sedlow had said as he transferred his foot from brake to accelerator. “Already on the six-thirty back to San Sal. Not our deal.” When I say that Elena was not one of those who saw how every moment could connect I mean that it did not occur to her that a transit passenger need show no visa.