Banquo's Ghosts (10 page)

Bryce followed the lawyer into the office, watched him throw his suit jacket over the back of his chair, pick up his mail, and put his feet on a wastebasket beside his desk. He waved a vague hand in no particular direction. “Have a seat.”

Which is when the two invitees from the two cubicles joined them. Two women in their thirties who could have been the living sisters of Veronica and Betty from the
Archie
cartoons. Only all grown up, in business suits, serious as heart attacks and not smiling or gossiping. They wore their FBI badges in the breast pockets of their suit jackets, and photo IDs hung around their necks. That was because they had firearms in a federal building, custom .32 Berettas, not much stopping power, but they did fit in the waistband of an F. Tripler skirt. They stared at Bryce as though examining a rare species of insect.

Without looking up from yesterday’s unopened mail, O’Hanlon introduced the two women, “Agent Barbara Smith and Agent Darcy Wesson. No relation to the Hasbro Corporation or the firearms manufacturer. Can you
believe
that? And they didn’t pick their office assignments either, so you
know
this had to be a government accident. We call their presence ‘The Holy Order of Saint Beatrice of the Babes.’ And that wasn’t in your frickin’ briefing book was it?”

Bryce made no remark. Accustomed to his place at the spanking pole.

Disgusted at the state of the world, O’Hanlon threw a couple of pieces of unopened mail into the wastebasket, then looked up at the two FBI agents assigned to his office.

“Let me introduce Mr. Bryce here. His Central Intelligence Agency boss down in Virginia sent him up. The Agency man is a big wheel, or thinks he is. He has an interest in my old man’s ‘Rabbi,’ back when my old man was alive, God rest his soul. Back in the 1970s, the Rabbi showed my old man the ins and outs. The two guys came up together, y’know, a chunk of Vietnam. My dad an infantryman, his friend—well, it was never discussed. When they both left public service, they started a little investment firm together, my dad as junior something-or-other. At least one of them made a fortune. But as everybody knows, my dad lost his cut, spent it on wine, women, and song. Broke my mother’s heart, and I don’t remember the words to the song, so don’t ask.”

Here O’Hanlon gave them the important stuff, raising a single finger to the ceiling as though indicating their own dingy government suites. “Well . . . Dad’s Rabbi never
really
left public service. He still works out of an office in Rockefeller Center. And Mr. Bryce here thinks maybe this guy—his name’s Banquo—has wandered off the reservation. So a three-piece suit in Virginia wants us to spy on one of our
own
guys, who my old man knew once upon a midnight dreary . . . Open a criminal investigation, which gives me hives all by itself. Like we don’t have enough to do, right?”

The two women, mildly more interested now, began to cock their heads one way, then the other like curious cats—as if gradually more intrigued in this species of insect named Bryce.

“Go on,” O’Hanlon told Bryce. “Explain to Barbara and Darcy. Start over from the point I threw your damn ID out the window.”

“I
t’s time you learned some fieldwork.” Those had been Robert Wallets’ exact words in the offices of Banquo & Duncan. Up till now it was merely laps in the pool and some treadmill at the New York Athletic Club. Later, a little Tae Bo Boxing with a handsome trainer so he didn’t trip over his feet. Neither boxing nor walking came naturally to him. But what Wallets had in mind now was of a different order entirely, and nothing in the man’s eyes betrayed the struggle to come.

He’d shown up at the Rockefeller Center building as appointed, first thing in the morning, meeting his soon-to-be tormentor downstairs. Surprised to find Wallets standing there not in his regulation gray flannel suit but wearing an expensive, weathered field jacket and Gander Mountain hiking boots. Johnson looked down at his own clothes, his swell city duds: Brooks Brothers’ $1,500 navy blue special, pinstriped and cuffed. Watch fob across the vest, $200 starched white shirt open at the collar, and diamond cuff links. His cordovan wingtips were brand spanking new. He looked down at himself and then at Wallets, realizing he was overdressed and for the wrong occasion. He assumed of course he could just show up as usual, assumed there’d be some preliminaries, some orientation, and then B & D would provide any necessary outdoor wear.

“I think Orvis is about to open. They have two stores, one just off Madison—”

But Banquo’s man cut him off.

“Never mind, Peter. You go to war with the wardrobe you have.”

And Johnson didn’t like the sound of this at all. “Where are we going?”

Morning rush hour at the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal on the west side of Manhattan. Yeah, another kind of fraternity hazing ritual.
I’ll follow you anywhere, Sir.
The exterior of the place looked like a parking garage made of blue Erector Set pieces. Inside, your skin crawled every step you took. The grime on the ticket counter, the strange crunchiness underfoot, as throngs of grumpy commuters from across the river streamed into the city for their slave wages. Wallets advised him he’d “better eat something,” and so he did, from a Nathan’s counter. A cockroach peeked at him from behind the mustard spigot. And that was after he’d doused his $3.50 frankfurter. For a moment he considered throwing it away, but commonsense intervened, and he ate it anyway. The smartest thing he ever did. That frank lasted him what seemed a long, long time. And before too long it became the Über Dream Wiener, the best he’d ever tasted.

The grimy concrete bus bay was poorly lit. Hurrying to keep up, he never saw their posted destination, but he did notice spilled mustard on his vest. Oh, for Goodness’ Sakes, he’d stained his own pretty blue party dress. Well, you go to war with the wardrobe you have. So it was with a queasy feeling Johnson slumped next to Wallets on the Greyhound to ride the dog. The Lincoln tunnel stench filled the bus and didn’t leave; it lingered across the meadowlands past the refineries and most of the way through New Jersey. They were heading south.

A little after midnight they crawled off the bus, stiff and limp at the same time. A tin sign said “Bus Stop—Danbury, NC,” hammered beside the screen door of a rural diner. Johnson peered hopefully up and down the empty street for a motel or car park, something. A couple of streetlights, the place shut for the night. No Holiday Inn, no McDonald’s, no KFC, only local shops: the Danbury General Store, a couple of small restaurants. Welcome to Nowhereville, North Carolina.

They promptly walked out of town, down the paved streets, past the lit entrance to an army base, to where the pavement gave up. The base sign read:

Past the main gate the road turned to dirt and rose. They climbed.

Below them, Johnson could see the lit fort fencing, Quonset huts, array of buildings, and guard posts. And Johnson got the idea that Wallets had been here before. That he must have been with the 10
^th
Mountain once upon a time.

“Hey, you know that place, Mr. Eagle Scout?” Johnson asked.

“Won my merit badges there,” came the reply.

They marched from around midnight to 3 AM, Johnson’s watch told him, with no idea where Daniel Boone here was headed. Growing more and more winded, straining his casual smoker’s lung capacities. He had never taken to the outdoors and had never spent one night out camping, even as a lad. Out here, there were crickets and the sound of wind in the trees, the air sweet and clean. But he was hungry and worn out. One of his wingtips was rubbing one ankle raw.

With every step, the pain grew a tiny bit worse. So what was all this crap about—the Flat Foot Test? Did they expect him to wander out of the wilderness in Jesus boots? Such a small thing stinging down on his ankle, a toothache kind of pain. Why did a mild discomfort make you want to worry it? The annoying in-between state, neither here nor there. He toyed with the idea of taking off his shoes; no, dumb idea. His feet were softer than butter. Best to leave the shoes to rub.

It occurred to Johnson that he had lived his whole life in a buttery in-between state. For he never chose to take a stand, never confronted some difficult issue with one of his wives so they could press through the pain together to something better. Never committed himself to a dangerous point of view unless there were some compensating benefit that outweighed the personal jeopardy by several orders of magnitude. Never saw any authority higher than himself. And never really knew what a bad place that was to be, except for now.

So would he press through this time? He thought he heard something in the crickets’ song—the lonely sound of an abandonment of everything including himself, to this cause, to the
resistance
. He felt himself gripped by a kind of vertigo; while the crickets spoke to him, taunting him with every step, mocking his pain, his self-pity and fear. Words for each step as his wingtip rubbed his ankle raw:

Manhattan Scribbler!
reek-creek
What no Starbucks?
reek-creek
Call a Taxi!
reek-creek

Would he give himself to this cause? No. No, he wouldn’t. Suddenly he stopped. That’s all he had to do. Just stop. And stand in the dark, to stop the madness. Making the decision to save his dignity right there and then from the inevitable humiliation he was sure to endure from some cockamamie scheme authored by those he’d spent his entire life hating—in particular that polished CIA Methuselah and Uncle Banquo’s spit-and-shine Jarhead. He would go no farther.

His ankle no longer spoke to him. It had made its point, and he waited for Wallets to stop and turn around so he could make his case to the martinet bastard. He began to form the words in his mind, a rebuke that would make Daniel Boone feel every bit the laughable excuse of a caricature he was. And he waited.

But the man wasn’t stopping for some Manhattan Swank missing his latte; he just kept crunching ahead. Wallets’ steps began to get a little fainter. Johnson wanted to yell out, “Hey!” But that felt just too pathetic. He lifted his arms, palms upturned in confounded futility. No one there to see it. And soon he was alone, alone with the crickets and his sore ankle, alone in the dark, alone on a path where he didn’t know how to go ahead or go back, all alone, Peter Johnson.

Hours later, close to daybreak, almost too tired and distraught to care if he ever made it out of these black woods, Johnson came to a large clearing. He had followed Wallets the best he could but with no idea whether his feet had tramped off somewhere on their own. He made out the clearing as some sort of abandoned service station for heavy machinery, cranes, bulldozers, backhoes, and such, their hulking forms like petrified dinosaurs in a dark museum. The broken bits of rusting metal were everywhere. He picked his way through them but
felt something slice sharply across the side of his wingtip. Pretty sure the sharp refuse hadn’t cut his foot, but he felt damn sure the thing cut his $30 sock, exposing his right big toe to the air. Oh, for Chrissakes. A final indignity. He fought back tears and wanted to kick something, but then he might really hurt himself. If this were a test of endurance, he was losing. If a test of manhood, he’d already failed.

A little ahead, the ghost of a service station garage stared at him. He made out a human figure. Someone sitting. Wallets—naturally—propped up on an upside-down plastic five-gallon empty joint compound bucket. His white teeth smiled broadly. “Thought I lost you,” he chuckled.

Johnson thought of a hundred things to yell at the man, from “F—you” right down the line to “Your Mother Wears Army Boots and Swims after Troop Ships” (a distinct possibility), but finally gathered himself and said as deadpan as possible, “I once was lost, but now I’m found. Hallelujah.” The pain from his ankle nagged him again, and he stared down his trousers leg, all the way down to his exposed, cold naked hobo toe.

“Now that you’ve deigned to join me,” his wilderness guide said, “I get the office; you get the garage.”

The station was in two parts like any service station: a cavelike work-bay area, with concrete floor slab, work pits, and broken garage doors. Then off to the side, an “office” with its counter, a couple of plastic chairs, old Snap-on Tool calendars, and the faded poster of Miss Liquid Wrench 1991—“When You Need a Good Yank”—curling at the edges. A rather lithesome blonde dish with admirable assets. She wore only her panties, a blaze-orange thong that seemed to light up the dank office all on its own. The office stood intact, the large plate-glass window informing all the world they’d reached that pinnacle of rustbelt Southern industry: Dobbs Machine & Diesel.

In less than four minutes, Wallets rummaged a tall steel locker with a combination lock on the latch and took out a large waterproof freezer tote sack, from which he drew out a sleeping bag in a large sealed baggie, a folded hammock, a length of mosquito netting and a few other items. Before the four minutes elapsed the hammock hung
in the office from two cleverly placed hooks, the sleeping bag lay on the hammock, the man lay in the sleeping bag, with each of his boots on either side of his head to give him some air space, and the mosquito netting over all.

“I’m going to knock off for a couple of hours. In the meantime, make yourself comfortable.”

Johnson stared, aghast. In another thirty seconds, gentle snores filled the dingy office. Johnson went to drag one of the office chairs out into the garage. No luck: bolted to the floor. So was the other. He took the bucket Wallets had occupied and sat on it, staring out the open bay into the darkness.

Johnson guessed the temperature up here in the foothills of North Carolina in early September hovered around forty-eight to sixty degrees at night. It felt like thirty. His feet were numb. The sweat from the climb chilled along his spine. His hands began to shake. And out of nowhere hungry mosquitoes found his face.