Free The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion Page A

briefly, lifting a transparent flap of the Regal Rents tent to survey the barricade behind which the press was waiting. He had looked directly at her but such was his generalized view of the world outside his tent that he had not recognized her and she had not spoken.
    “Send out some refreshments,” she had heard him say to a waiter before he dropped the flap, although no refreshments ever materialized. “Like, you know, diet Pepsi, water, I’m not paying so they can tank up.”
    The wife and daughter no longer lived in the house. The wife and daughter had moved to a town house just inside the Beverly Hills line from Century City and the daughter had transferred from Westlake to Beverly Hills High School. Catherine had told her that.
    Living in the real world.
    We had a real life and now we don’t.
    She put that out of her mind.
    Other lessons.
    More recent venues.
    Not long after moving to Washington she had interviewed an expert on nuclear security who had explained how easy it would be to score plutonium. The security for nuclear facilities, he said, was always contracted out. The contractors in turn hired locally and supplied their hires with minimum rounds of ammunition. Meaning, he had said, “you got multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security systems being operated by downsized sheriff’s deputies with maybe enough ammo to take down a coyote.”
    She remembered exactly what he said because the interview had ended up in the Sunday magazine and this had been the pull quote.
    If she could think of the man with the ponytail as a downsized sheriff’s deputy, a downsized sheriff’s deputy lacking even a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art security system, this would be all right.
    All it would take was nerve.
    All it would take was a show of belonging wherever it was she wanted to be.
    She got up, brushed the grass off her legs and walked to the open door of the concrete structure off the apron. The man with the ponytail was seated at a wooden crate on which there was an electric fan, a bottle of beer and a worn deck of Bicycle cards. He drained the beer, lobbed the bottle into a metal drum, and, with two fingers held stiff, turned over a card.
    “Shit,” the man said, then looked up.
    “You’re supposed to see that I get to San José,” she said. “They were supposed to have told you that.”
    The man turned over another card. “Who was supposed to tell me that.”
    This was going to require more work than the average telephone crew, pool man, dog groomer.
    “If I don’t get to San José they’re going to be wondering why.”
    “Who is.”
    She gambled. “I think you know who.”
    “Give me a name.”
    She had not been given names. She had asked Barry Sedlow for names and he had talked about compartmentalization, cutouts, need-to-know.
    You wouldn’t give me their real names anyway, she had said. Just give me the names they use.
    What’s that supposed to mean, he had said.
    The names they use like you use Gary Barnett, she had said.
    I’m not authorized to give you that information, he had said. Somebody’s supposed to meet you. Your need-to-know stops there.
    Somebody was supposed to meet her but somebody did not meet her.
    Somebody was supposed to make the payment and somebody had not made the payment.
    She was aware as she watched the man turn over cards of a sudden darkening outside, then of lightning. There was a map of Costa Rica on the wall of the concrete structure, reinforcing the impression that this was Costa Rica but offering no clue as to where in Costa Rica. The overhead light flickered and went out. The electric fan fluttered to a stop. In the absence of background noise she realized that she had been hearing the whine of an overworked refrigerator, now silent.
    The man with the ponytail got up, opened the refrigerator, and took another beer from its darkenedinterior. He did not offer one to Elena. Instead he sat down and turned over another card, whistling softly between his