The Last Thing He Wanted (17 page)

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.”

4

A
ctually 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.”

It was some days after my last visit to Chez Roberto when a man I did not know sat down across from me in the coffee shop at the Sheraton. He was carrying one of the small zippered leather purses that in San Salvador at that time suggested the presence of a 9mm Browning, and he was also carrying a sheaf of recent American newspapers, which he folded open on the table and began to scan, grease pencil in hand.

I continued eating my shrimp cocktail.

“I see we have the usual agitprop from your colleagues,” he said, grease-penciling a story datelined San Salvador in the Miami
Herald.

Some time passed.

I finished the shrimp cocktail and signaled for a check.

According to the clock over the cashier’s desk the man had now been reading the newspapers at my table for eleven minutes.

“Maybe I misunderstood the situation,” he said as I signed the check. “I was under the impression you’d been looking for Bob Weir.”

I asked if he were Bob Weir.

“I could be,” he said.

This pointlessly sinister encounter ended, as many such encounters in San Salvador at that time ended, inconclusively. Bob Weir said that he would be more
than happy to talk to me about the country, specifically about its citizens, who were entrepreneurial to the core and wanted no part of any authoritarian imposition of order. Bob Weir also said that he would be more than happy to introduce me to some of these entrepreneurial citizens, but unfortunately the ones I mentioned, most specifically Colonel Álvaro García Steiner, were out of the city or engaged in other business or simply not seeing anyone at the present time.

Many people who ran into Bob Weir of course assumed that he was CIA.

I had no particular reason to doubt this, but neither did I have any particular reason to believe it.

All I knew for certain about Bob Weir was that when I looked at his face I did not see his face.

I saw a forensic photograph of his face.

I saw his throat cut ear to ear.

I mentioned this to a few people and we all agreed: whatever Bob Weir was playing, he was in over his head. Bob Weir was an expendable. That Bob Weir was still alive and doing business two years later, not just doing business but doing it in yet another interesting place at yet another interesting time, not just doing it in this interesting place at this interesting time but doing it as a “previously reliable source,” remains evidence of how little any of us understood.

5

W
hen Treat Morrison told me later about his unexpected visit from Mark Berquist he said that he had been a little distracted.

Otherwise, he said, he would have handled it differently.

Wouldn’t have let the kid get under his skin.

Would have focused in on what the kid was actually saying.

Underneath the derring-do.

Underneath the kid talking like he was goddamn General Lansdale.

He had been a little distracted, he said, ever since Diane died.

Diane Morrison, 52, wife of, after a short illness.

Diane, he said, had been one of God’s bright and beautiful creatures, and at some point during the month or two before she died he had begun having trouble focusing in, trouble concentrating.

Then of course she did die.

He had finally straightened out the shifts with the nurses and just like that, she died.

And after that of course there was certain obligatory stuff.

The usual obligatory financial and social stuff, you know what I mean.

Then nothing.

The nurses weren’t there and neither was she.

And one night he came home and he didn’t want dinner and he didn’t want to go to bed and he just kept having another drink until it was near enough to dawn to swim a few laps and go to the office.

Hell of a bad night, obviously.

And when he got to the office that morning, he said, he realized he’d been on overload too long, it was time to get away for a few days, he’d even considered going to Rome by himself but he didn’t see how he could spare the time, and the end result was that he spent about eleven months running on empty.

Eleven months being a little distracted.

As far as this visit from Mark Berquist went, in the first place the kid had caught him working late, trying to clear his desk so he could get the early flight down there, it was imperative that he get the early flight because Alex Brokaw was delaying his own weekly flight to San José in order to brief him in the secure room at the airport, so this had been a situation in which he was maybe even more distracted than usual.

You can certainly see that, he added.

I was not sure that I could.

He had not been so distracted that he neglected to enter into his office log, since the secretaries who normally kept his schedule were gone, the details of the meeting in his own painstaking hand:

Date: Monday August 13 1984
.

Place: 2201 C Street, N.W.

Time: In 7:10 p.m./out 7:27 p.m.

Present: T.A.M. / Mark Berquist

Subject: Unscheduled visit, B. Weir, other topics.

“That was just clerical,” Treat Morrison said when I mentioned the log entry. “That wasn’t concentrating, that was just reflex, that was me covering my ass like the clerks do, if you spent any time in Washington you’d know this, you do your goddamn log on autopilot.”

He was cracking the knuckles of his right hand, a tic.

“As far as I was concerned,” he said, “this was just another kid from the Hill with wacko ideas that any sane person had to know wouldn’t get to first base outside the goddamn District of Columbia.”

He fell silent.

“Christ,” he said then. “I should have taken the three or four days and gone to Rome.”

Again he fell silent.

I tried to picture Treat Morrison in Rome.

In the single image that came to mind he was walking by himself on the Veneto, early evening, everybody sitting out in front of the Excelsior as if it were still 1954, everybody except Treat Morrison.

Shoulders slightly hunched, gaze straight ahead.

Walking past the Excelsior as if he had someplace to go.

“Because the point is,” he said, then stopped. When he again spoke his voice was reasonable but he was
again cracking the knuckles of his right hand. “The point is, if I’d gone to Rome, this meeting never had to happen. Because I would have been back on my game before this dipshit kid ever got south of Dulles.”

It was he who kept circling back to this meeting with Mark Berquist, worrying it, chipping at it, trying to accommodate his failure to fully appreciate that the central piece in the puzzle he might not want to put together had been right there in his office.

Mark Berquist.