Banquo's Ghosts (7 page)

“Apologize to Mr. Johnson,” Wallets instructed the last of the Snaps. “I think you have something you want to return to him.”

The hood looked at the ground. He wasn’t such a bad kid, just a violent opportunist who didn’t know any better. Whom nobody’d bothered to teach the golden rule or common decency, show him the straight and narrow. Now with a sudden knowledge of instant retribution. But that didn’t make it any better; without looking up again the kid said, “Sorry, Mister.”

Wallets looked at the others. Snappy One was breathing a little better but still couldn’t stand. Snappy Two had found his teeth and put them in his shirt pocket for the ER dentist. Thinking ahead.

The kid in front of Johnson pulled a wad of credit cards out of the front pocket of his jeans, which were nearly as low-riding as Johnson’s after they had cut them up. He handed the plastic cards through the window; yeah, Johnson’s were there, along with a dozen others. Astonished, Johnson muttered, “Thank you. I’ll see the others get back to their owners.”

“Dexter got the cash,” the kid said. The two other boys began to stick their fingers in their pockets, searching.

“You two, don’t move,” Wallets ordered. They went very still.

Then to Johnson, “You want to press charges?” A flat question. The man didn’t care either way.

“Well, I . . . ”

“Well,
what?
Make a decision,” Wallets demanded.

“No.” Johnson shook his head, ready for the whole business to be done. The other two opportunists held out their hands. Johnson’s cash. Maybe fifty bucks. The cash in the kid’s hand by the street lamp was smeared with blood.

Wallets measured Johnson for a moment. No, the scribbler didn’t want his money back.

“You can keep the cash,” Wallets said quietly. Then fished a business card out of his jacket pocket, and held it up in the street light for the kid at the car to see.

“Take it.” The kid just stared with a look of fear and puzzlement, as if it might bite him. “Take it!” He reached gingerly, cautiously. Peered hard, reading.

“If you ever decide to give up smash and grab, if you ever decide to do something in life that doesn’t disappoint your mothers, come see me. Call and tell the secretary where we met. She’ll make an appointment.” The kid didn’t know what to make of all this, but the gears were working, and suddenly he knew
quite clearly
this was no bullshit.

“And wear your best Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. I work in an office.”

Over eggs and bacon and toast and black coffee, Johnson glanced through the Acropolis Diner window at the cab parked outside by the curb. The coffee went right into his veins. He nodded at the Middle Eastern cabbie waiting patiently for them, before looking back at Wallets in the booth across from him.

“So you squire me home from a Jo von H party but call me the next morning. Vanish like a ghost. A year later you appear out of nowhere to rescue this damsel in distress, then take her to breakfast. So you’re a full-service banker?”

Wallets glanced at him askance, then said gravely, “Actually, I’m curious whether you’d like to stand like a drunk in the street for the rest of your life holding up your pants—intellectual or otherwise—or attempt to have some effect in the real world.” Johnson recognized the reference to a
New York Review of Books
essay he wrote last year, “Sartre vs. Camus: Collaborator and Freedom Fighter—Being with Nothingness?” on a biography of Sartre and one of Camus published at the same time. The line went, “Sartre held up his intellectual pants with the Gestapo’s Death’s Head belt buckle of approval. Camus actually fought them.”

“As I recall,” Wallets went on, “you gave Sartre of WWII the worst of it because his most famous work,
Being and Nothingness
, bore the official Nazi Occupation Authority’s stamp of orthodoxy on the copyright page.”

“He deserved it. He didn’t resist.” Johnson looked at his toast, growing cold, leathery.

“Funny you should mention it.” Wallets gazed off along the empty stools in the diner. “Resistance is exactly what we’d like to discuss with you.”

“We?” But Johnson could feel where this was headed. The big
They
. Was he being recruited? He’d read about such things in spy novels, but like something in a
Penthouse
letter, never thought it happened to real people. And now the opportunity—the call to
résistance
—appeared out of nowhere, a man in the night, a caped crusader without the cape. Now sitting across from him in a lonely diner booth at 3 AM.

Intrigued, amused, and even a little flattered, Peter Johnson agreed to meet Wallets later in the weekend. At first, in a flush of drunken ambition, Johnson insisted he could meet him the next day. Wallets said they’d make it Sunday, 10 AM, at his office in Rockefeller Center. Which was fortuitous—because after his dive into the stout earlier in the night, the next day Johnson could barely rouse himself to open his apartment door and pick up the
Times
sitting in the hallway.

Walking into the empty lobby of 30 Rock, Johnson already didn’t like this place, or these people. The echoing imperial lobby, the huge twisted torsos in the Diego Rivera murals, made him feel very small. Who in Manhattan besides custodial staff and lackeys worked at 10 AM on a Sunday? So he thought he was doing well to have on dark trousers and a dress shirt with no tie.

He immediately felt underdressed and unprepared. When he met Banquo for the first time, the man looked as if he had already come from making a PowerPoint presentation at Bank of America—dark blue, pin-striped, cuff-linked, and polished to a precise, spare formality. He sat at the end of a long conference table and neither offered his hand nor rose to greet him, seemingly absorbed in a thin file in front of him, with a capped fountain pen sitting nearby. He looked at Johnson over tortoiseshell granny glasses.

“Thank you for coming.”

And with no further pleasantries Johnson took a chair, then glanced at Wallets. The fellow was dressed likewise, in a dark charcoal gray, giving him a sharp prosecutorial edge, but said nothing, content, it seemed, to let the older man take charge.

“Mr. Johnson, if you are going to be any use to us, it’s best if we come to some mutual understanding. And such understandings are best when stipulated up front. Your presence here indicates you wish to be of use. We wish it also.” Banquo cleared his throat once. “Very well. Let us understand each other.”

And for the next few minutes the older man gravely explained how things would go:

“You have to keep writing, no matter what. And you are going to have to fulfill that book contract. The publishing house has been nice to you so far, but the cancellation of your contract for,” Banquo looked down his reading glasses, glanced at a paper on his desk, and magisterially quoted from it, “ah-hem, ‘an untitled work of nonfiction,’ is around the corner. And Banquo & Duncan will not allow your journalistic credibility to be compromised—at least not any more than you’ve compromised it already.”

“You afraid I’m a dead-beat?” Johnson snorted. “What—have you been reading my agent’s emails?”

Banquo pointedly didn’t answer. He turned from Johnson, addressing his next remarks to Wallets. “Explain to Mr. Johnson the facts of life.”

And the irreducible facts of life were pretty simple. He would come into their offices to meet with them whenever requested. He’d keep his literary bona fides impeccable, do everything he promised to do. Hurt the war effort every chance he could. Keep his drinking within reasonable bounds so he wasn’t a target for punks. And more importantly make himself available to any graft that might come his way. This last bit to endear him to those whose only measure of mankind was their insatiable potential for corruption. The unsolvable riddle of men:

If you couldn’t be bought, you weren’t worth having. And couldn’t be trusted.

Actually, he wasn’t anywhere close to sure he “wished to be of use.” He made no commitments, not in his own mind at least. Hell, conversations were harmless, no? A little chitchat about how he could help the “resistance”? It could make a piece: “Why They
Should
Hate Us: The Inside Story from a Would-Be CIA Operative.” Frankly, he was curious, and though he didn’t want to admit it, he also liked the taste of betrayal, of double-crossing his ideological soul mates whose entire intellectual construct was a kind of national betrayal. How twisted was that?

Anyway, he could back out at any time. Just as he told himself many times, back when he was married, in the wee hours of a bar crawl with some lonely, available, easy-to-amuse woman ready to be plucked: The first drink never meant anything.
Just one drink—of course he was going to be faithful.
Two drinks?
She seemed to be having a good time.
The third?
A very good time.
The fourth drink—
still telling himself it was nothing,
as she snuggled her ass up to him at the bar; then back at her flat . . .

Only to wake up with a stranger, having of course cheated on his wife, regrets buzzing around his head, getting entangled in the cobwebs of his hangover. Could this be like that? Minus the drinking and the woman? And except that this time he really could, and would, stop? That’s what Johnson told himself.

While another part of him secretly loved being worth having. The only question: What would it take to get there?

The answer: more than he ever imagined.

Years and years of talk. Just talk. The calm and sober voice of Wallets poked and prodded him at every turn. And it seemed to fill his head with cinders; even in his dreams, the unrelenting voice binding him to the chair in that dreadful office one rope at a time, making him squirm. Beginning with every squalid detail of his life: “Peter Johnson. Born 1955, Wickham, England. Father, Colonel in the 8
^th
Light Infantry, ret. Mother, librarian, Wickham Public Library. Both deceased. Graduated Magdalen College, Oxford, 1977, taking a first in modern European history. Married Josephine von Hildebrand 1976, amicable divorce 1978. No children. Immediately took a job with the
Guardian
newspaper. Then
Newsweek
, immigrating to the United States 1980. Married again, Françoise Ducat, amicable divorce 1987,” Wallets coughed, quietly clearing his throat, “more or less. Daughter Giselle, offspring of your second wife Ms. Ducat—now living in Paris. Third wife, Elizabeth Richards, forty-five, assistant curator for the ancient Middle East, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Amicable divorce in—”

“All true as it goes,” Johnson interrupted.

“No one asked you a question, Mr. Johnson. Would you like to tell me something that isn’t ‘true as it goes’?”

Johnson shut his trap. Wallets wanted to impress on him, if you have nothing to say, don’t say it. Harder to learn than you’d think.

“Reported on the first Iraq Gulf War for
Newsweek
, was assigned to the Third Infantry Division—Rock of the Marne, of course—during Operation Iraqi Freedom for
The Crusader
magazine. Managed to file viciously antiwar pieces about the most popular American military engagement since World War II. Wrote ‘The Myth of the “Rape” of Kuwait,’ expanded into a small book.
Crusader
cover piece, ‘Dresden for Our Times: Fear and Loathing on the Highway of Death,’ won a National Magazine Award.” He paused, then sarcastically, “Nice work, Peter.”

This time he kept his tongue between his teeth.

Not only did they play
This Is Your Life
, but they showed him the world from many new angles. Over the course of time the men at Banquo & Duncan gave him a tutorial on matters related to the Middle East worthy of a PhD. It might have been easier to memorize Jane’s
Defense Weekly
’s rundown for every country in the region, given the military details they poured into his ear. The number of divisions, the chain-of-command, the weaponry, where purchased, and even the uniforms—with a special emphasis on Iran. He could have earned a minor degree in physics and engineering, in learning how a nuclear reaction worked and how a bomb was built. By the end, he could rattle off the specifications of the Iranian reactor at Bushar. They marinated him in Middle Eastern culture, which tribes were which and the social niceties that made them go—an overflowing tea cup meant you were welcome; if not filled to the brim, not so much. The details of Sharia law, down to how it mandated that you respond to a sneeze.
Yarhamukallah!
May God bestow His Mercy on You.