Joan Didion - The Last Thing He Wanted

“Actually a fairly feeble demo,” the driver reported having heard Alex Brokaw say at the exact instant it began to happen, first the quick burst of semiautomatic fire, then, as the police closed in, the dull pops of the tear gas canisters.

“Nothing like a little tear gas to clear out the sinuses,” is what Alex Brokaw recalled saying.

According to the police report on the incident, inquiries focused on two Hondurans registered until that morning at the airport Days Inn. According to the embassy report on the incident, the two missing Hondurans could not be located for questioning but were not assets of any U.S. agency known to the embassy.

That the two missing Hondurans were not assets of any U.S. agency known to the embassy was a second thing Treat Morrison doubted.

The third thing Treat Morrison doubted was more amorphous, and had to do with the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of a plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw. There was from the outset something about this report that had struck many people in Washington and Miami as overly convenient, beginning with the fact that it coincided with the workup sessions on legislation providing military aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters for fiscal year 1985. The same people in Washington and Miami tended to dismiss these recent incidents as equally convenient, further support for the theory that Alex Brokaw, in an effort to lay the foundation for a full-scale overt buildup on the island, had himself put the assassination report into play and was now lending credibility to the report with further suggestions of American personnel under siege.

“Clouding his own pond” was what Alex Brokaw was said to be doing.

The consensus that Alex Brokaw was clouding his own pond had by late July reached critical mass, as had the colliding metaphors: the way in which Alex Brokaw was said to be clouding his own pond was by “playing the Reichstag card.”

The problem with clouding your own pond by playing the Reichstag card was that you would have to be fairly dense to try it, since otherwise you would know that everybody would immediately assume you were clouding your own pond by playing the Reichstag card.

That Alex Brokaw was sufficiently dense to so cloud his own pond was the third thing Treat Morrison doubted, and to locate the point at which these doubts intersected would have been part of his agenda. The other part of his agenda would have had to do with the unexpected visit he received, the evening before leaving Washington, from the senior foreign policy aide to the senator whose visit to the area had raised the original questions.

“T.M., I’ll only be on your screen for fifteen minutes,” Mark Berquist had said when he materialized, pink-cheeked and wearing a seersucker suit, in Treat Morrison’s office after the secretaries had left. The air-conditioning was off and the windows were open and Mark Berquist’s shirt had appeared to be constricting his throat. “It might be wise if we got some air.”

“Mr. Berquist,” Treat Morrison had said. “Why not sit down.”

A barely perceptible pause. “Actually I’d prefer we took a walk,” Mark Berquist had said meaningfully, his eyes scanning the bookshelves as if a listening device might reveal itself disguised as a copy of Foreign Affairs.

“I wouldn’t presume to take up your time.”

There had been a silence.

Treat Morrison had looked at his desk clock.

“You’ve wasted two minutes, which leaves you thirteen,” Treat Morrison said.

There had been another silence, then Mark Berquist took off his seersucker jacket and arranged it on the back of a chair. When he finally sat down he avoided looking directly at Treat Morrison.

“Let me give you a little personal background,” Mark Berquist said then.

He said that he had been on the Hill for five years, ever since graduating from Villanova. At Villanova, he said, it so happened that he had been fortunate enough to know the sons of several prominent Cuban exiles, and the sons as well of two ambassadors to Washington from that general area, namely Argentina and El Salvador. It had been these friendships, he said, that ultimately led to his commitment to do his humble best to level the playing field for democracy in the area.

Treat Morrison turned his desk clock to face Mark Berquist.

“Seven,” he said.

“You’re aware that we have an interest there.” Mark Berquist was finally meeting Treat Morrison’s eyes. “A kind of situation.”

“I’d get to it fast if I were you.”

“It may be a situation you’re not going to want to get into.”

Treat Morrison at first said nothing.

“Goddamn,” he said then. “I have actually never heard anyone say something like that.” In fact this was not true. Treat Morrison had been hearing people say things like that his entire adult life, but none of these people had been twenty-seven-year-old staff aides on the Hill. “Call me naive, but I would have thought you’d have to be an actor to say something like that.”

Treat Morrison had leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Ever given any thought to doing some acting, Mr. Berquist? Going on the boards? Smell of the greasepaint, roar of the crowd?”

Mark Berquist said nothing as he stood up.

“Not all that different from politics,” Treat Morrison said. He was now studying the ceiling, squinting slightly at the overhead light. “If you stop to analyze it. I assume you saw certain people down there.”

Mark Berquist yanked his seersucker jacket off the back of the chair, biting off each word evenly. “It’s an old boys’ town here, and you’re one of the old boys, so feel free to take any shot you want. I am just telling you that this is a puzzle with a lot of pieces you may not want to put together.”

“One of the people I’m assuming you saw was Bob Weir.”

“That’s a fishing expedition,” Mark Berquist said. “And I’m not biting.”

Treat Morrison said nothing.

Bob Weir was the “previously reliable source” who had in late June reported the existence of the plot to assassinate Alex Brokaw.

“And just let me add one thing,” Mark Berquist said. “You would be making a serious error in judgment if you were to try to crucify Bob Weir.”

Treat Morrison had watched in silence as Mark Berquist jabbed his arms into the seersucker jacket in an attempt to find the sleeves.

“By the way,” Treat Morrison said then. “For future reference. I’m not an old boy.”

Actually I had met Bob Weir.

I had come across him two years before, in 1982, in San Salvador, where he was running not a restaurant but a discotheque, a dispirited place called Chez Roberto, eight tables and a sound system in a strip mall in the San Benito district. Within hours of arriving in San Salvador I had begun hearing the name Bob Weir mentioned, always guardedly: it seemed that he was an American with what was called an interesting history, an apparent gift for being in interesting places at interesting times. He happened for example to have been managing an export firm in Guatemala at the time Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown. He happened to have been managing a second export firm, in Managua, at the time the Somoza regime was overthrown. In San Salvador he was said to be particularly close to a distinctly bad actor named Colonel Álvaro García Steiner, who had received special training from the Argentinian military in domestic counterterrorism, at that time a local specialty.

In the absence of anything more constructive to do I stopped by Chez Roberto on several different evenings, hoping to talk to its proprietor. There were the usual armored Cherokee Chiefs in the parking area and the usual Salvadoran businessmen inside (I never saw anyone dancing at Chez Roberto, nor in fact did I ever see a woman) but on each of these evenings Bob Weir was said to be “out of the city” or engaged in “other business” or simply “not seeing anyone at the present time.”