Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

“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.”

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.

The Fourth of July embassy picnic that must have seemed, given a country in which any American citizen who happened to be in the vicinity happened also to be in the official or covert employ of one or another branch of the embassy, a trying tradition at best.

She needed, she had said, to replace a lost passport.

She did not want to interrupt the picnic, she had said, but she had gone to the consulate and the guard at the gate said the consulate was closed for the holiday, and she needed her passport replaced immediately.

She needed her passport replaced immediately because she needed to return to the United States immediately.

The woman had seemed, according to the consular officer who was finally located to deal with her, “a little confused,” and “unable or unwilling” to accept his “offer to try to clear up the confusion.”

The confusion of course was that this woman already had her passport.

Her presence inside the tented area was proof that she already had her passport.

The confusion with this woman had begun at the gate.

She had also told the marine on duty at the gate that she had lost her passport, and when he told her to return the next morning when the consular office reopened she had insisted that tomorrow would be too late, she needed to see a consular officer now.

The marine had explained that this would be impossible because all the consular officers were at the Fourth of July picnic.

The Fourth of July picnic that unfortunately she could not attend because guests were required to present an American passport.

At which point this woman had produced her passport.

And left it, as any other guest not known to the embassy would have left his or her passport, with the guard at the entrance to the tented area.

This woman had left her passport and signed the embassy guest book.

There it was, he could show it to her, her signature: Elise Meyer.

Here it was, the guard could and would return it to her, her passport: Elise Meyer.

That was the confusion.

According to the consular officer she had taken the passport and held it out, as if she were about to show or give it to him. There had been a moment of silence before she spoke. “This was just to get me in because I need to explain something,” she had said, and then she had fallen silent.

She had been looking across the tent.

The steel band had stopped playing.

The woman had seemed, the consular officer reported, “very interested in some of our Salvadoran friends.”

“Neat idea, by the way, the steel band,” the consular officer had added, “but next year it might be appropriate to tell them, ‘Rule Britannia’ isn’t ours.”

It was at the point when the steel band struck up “Rule Britannia” that the woman had put the passport in her bag, closed the bag, and walked out of the tent and across the lawn and out the gate.

“You were about to explain something,” the consular officer had said as she started to walk away.

“Forget it,” she had said without turning back.

That was the reason for ordering the background.

The background that was ordered to get a line on who she was and what she was doing there.

The background that threw up the glitch.

The background that turned up flat.

No history.

The passport bearing the name Elise Meyer showed that it had been issued on June 30 1984 at the United States Passport Agency in Miami, but the United States Passport Agency in Miami reported no record of having issued a passport in the name Elise Meyer.

That was the glitch.

The young FBI agent who had flown down from the Miami office had opened the initial interview by mentioning the glitch.

She had looked puzzled.

The discrepancy, the anomaly, whatever she wanted to call it.

He was certain that she could clear this immediately.

He was sure that she would have a simple explanation for the glitch.

The anomaly.

The discrepancy.

She had offered no explanation at all.

She had merely shrugged. “At my age I don’t actually find discrepancies too surprising,” she had said. “You must be what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

He was twenty-five.

He had decided to try another tack.

“Assuming for the moment that someone provided you with apparently inauthentic documentation,” he began.

“You’re assuming that,” she said. “Naturally. Because you haven’t had a whole lot of experience with the way things work. You still think things work the way they’re supposed to work. I’m assuming something more along the lines of business as usual.”

“Excuse me?”

“I guess you must work in an office where nobody ever makes a mistake,” she said. “I guess where you work nobody ever hits the wrong key because they’re in a rush to go on break.”

“I don’t see your point.”

“You don’t think it’s possible that some low-level GS-whatever in the passport office accidentally deleted my record?”

This was in fact a distinct possibility, but he chose to ignore it. “Apparently inauthentic documentation is sometimes provided for the purpose of placing the carrier in a position where they can be blackmailed into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do.”

“Is that something you learned at Quantico?”

He ignored this. “In other words,” he repeated, “someone could have placed you in such a position.” He paused for emphasis. “Someone could be using you.”