Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  Yet through it all, snatches of shocking clarity came to him. First, he was sober and didn’t mind. Second, he felt no self-pity. No guilt.

  Self-pity and the guilt had been like the rumbling background noise of the saloon where he had lived much of his life. A philanderer and a drunk. Staggering from one lost moment to the next. Dreading more than most what Coleridge called the dread watch-tower of the absolute self.

  And now both were gone. Vanished under the darkness of this shitty, sweaty, smelly hood. He was free of them. Shanghaied, beaten, pissing razor blades—yet free, free at last.

  He had done something of consequence for once, something from which only others, not himself, had stood to benefit. The mullahs had to be very unhappy today, inshallah.

  People always fantasized, Johnson mused, if they’d only killed Hitler—never really knowing who the mysterious, faceless “they” were. They would do it, that’s all people knew. Wishing they would take a hand. Well, now he’d taken a hand. Not the anonymous they. Peter Johnson. For good or ill, forever and ever. Amen.

  The van lurched, and he fought the feeling of a fist gripping his guts and shoving them back up his throat.

  Two miserable hours later, Johnson sat on a wooden chair, hood still over his head. Hands and feet tied. He heard the sound of traffic somewhere outside the room. The sound of footsteps reached his chair, coming from behind. Once more the sack came off. Johnson blinked, even though the room was darkened. The air tasted stale but a thousand times better than breathing inside the sack. He saw the outlines of shuttered windows. A table with a lamp, chairs around the table. No one sitting there yet, the lamp switched off. Beside the table a video camera for recording purposes and a TV monitor, switched off.

  A familiar voice came to his ears. “Let’s be clear about one thing, Mr. Johnson.”

  A pause. The figure came around to where Johnson could see him. Sheik Kutmar in his familiar robes floated into his line of vision. The trim, clipped beard, the dark and knowing eyes. He approached the table, swept his robes behind him, and sat in a chair.

  “You are a bandit with no one to claim you. We can take you outside, cut off your head, and sell the video on the web. Who’s to stop us? Unless you’re prepared to be completely frank with me, you will never get out of here alive. Because no one has an interest in a failed assassin.”

  The Sheik scooted back in his chair. The metal legs made a teeth-on-edge scraping sound on the concrete floor. He turned on the light, more so he could make notes than shine it into Johnson’s face, like when the Movie Nazis gave the brave prisoner the “Treatment.” Johnson’s bladder was hurting him again. The words “failed assassin” echoed in his ears.

  He heard the door open behind him and footsteps. Then a figure in his view.

  Johnson blinked. He thought he was hallucinating. It was the sweet girl of his napping reveries, the proto-feminist of his imagined Iranian future—Yasmine.

  She was glowing and more striking than ever, the effect sharpened by her green headscarf and the harder set of her mouth. Johnson struggled to look behind him, as if there were some sort of joke that he could understand if only he could see back to who was stage-managing it.

  He began to sweat, as he did as a child in school when he didn’t have the answer to a problem or he had said something embarrassingly wrong—a flop-sweat breaking out on his forehead at the sight of Yasmine and at the word “failed.”

  “I’m sure Sheik Kutmar told you of the consequences of resisting us,” Yasmine began, her voice expressionless. At this point, resistance was the furthest thing from his mind.

  “But you . . . , ” he said.

  “I was assigned long ago by the Ministry of Intelligence and Security to watch Dr. Yahdzi. We’re not as childish as you think, Mr. Johnson.”

  “But why?”

  “Because he is,” and here she paused weighing her words. “Unreliable. An unreliable member of our team. But useful nonetheless.”

  Our team. So she was a rocket scientist after all. Something about his doubting eyes made her cut him to the quick.

  “Professor Yahdzi hasn’t seen his wife in seven years,” Sheik Kutmar added. “Didn’t even know what his children looked like anymore. They died in a car crash last year. A simple accident. A pity.”

  Johnson obsessed over the tense: “Is? Is unreliable?”

  “Present tense,” Yasmine said. “You failed to kill him, Mr. Johnson.”

  Johnson contorted his body to one side and that fist gripped his guts again, this time sending acid burning up his throat. His nose began to run. He tried to spit the bile out of his mouth, blowing as hard as he could, but it hung on his lips and chin. He tried to wipe his nose and mouth on his shoulder, but couldn’t do it, too constrained.

  “Are you finished?” the pretty olive face in the scrap of green cloth asked him, flatly.

  He tried to say, “But—but,” but not much came out.

  “But what, Mr. Johnson? Shouldn’t a ‘famous’ journalist ask better questions?”

  He managed.

  “But why—who? Why the gun on the dashboard?”

  “The driver was your contact on the inside. He did everything the Americans wanted him to do—except . . .” She trailed off, and the revolver from the dashboard appeared in her hand. She shook a couple of empty shells from the wheel. Then showed him the box where they came from, brass casings, powder cartridges. Hollywood blanks.

  “That he did for us,” she continued, “because we found him out and paid him a visit in front of his parents, wife, and son.” No point elaborating the threat. “He performed admirably, but still paid a price.”

  She removed something from her pocket and, with a curl of contempt on her lips, tossed it casually across the table at Johnson. It tumbled awkwardly, like an eight-sided die from a game of Dungeons & Dragons, and came to rest. Johnson saw it clearly. An opal ring. Smudged with a stain that looked like blood.

  “Such amateurs,” Yasmine practically spit out. “You Americans aren’t very good at this. At least not since overthrowing Mosaddeq, and even there you bumbled and fumbled and got lucky. Your masterly manipulations then were a concoction of our fevered national imagination. Sending a sodden journalist to do a man’s job. A sad joke.”

  So the whole thing had just been a fantasy of his own self-importance. No guilt this time, but shame overcame him in a rush. His body contorted; the razor blades were coming back.

  “You . . . I thought you . . .” But she cut him off.

  “I’m a patriot, Mr. Johnson. I believe it is our national right to possess a nuclear weapon. We are a great nation. Israel has one. India, Pakistan. Do you know what our country was like at the beginning of the twentieth century? A backwater. Take the village we were in the other day, a dung heap: multiply it the nation-over. Now we are close to taking our place in the sun. If you had killed Yahdzi, it would have hurt us badly. Set us back years. But we would have ended up in the same place. Kill the mullahs; topple the regime; we’ll still be in the same place. Kill me. There are millions more like me. We will still be in the same place.”

  Silence settled on the room, and she stared at him hard, seeming to feel her nation’s ascendance in her youth and her dominance at that table. Her adversary was crumpled and puke-flecked, pathetic. Looking at him seemed to make up for decades, for centuries of backwardness and decline. She could see he felt the humiliation sinking into every bit of him and that he couldn’t say anything, couldn’t think anything, couldn’t even think of thinking something without the hot influence of a perverse, person-twisting pang of shame. Good.

  “The green ink?” Johnson asked faintly.

  “Bait.”

  “If you knew I was a spy, why did—”

  “Because the ideal result was to have you incriminate yourself. The truth is the most powerful propaganda. Mr. Peter Johnson, clumsy assassin. Can you deny it?”

  He couldn’t.

  “We discovered your mission when we turned the dr
iver. But not with 100 percent accuracy. So we couldn’t arrest you without risking an embarrassing incident: Mad Mullahs Arrest Daring Journalist. Of course, the BBC or CNN International would never run with that story, but other outlets might. Now we know with certainty.” Her face seemed to shine at him, with an eagerness he’d forgotten since childhood. This scrap of a man wasn’t worth speaking to anymore, and she sat in a chair across from him in silence.

  Sheik Kutmar completed the thought for her. “Your foolish act has provided us with a great opportunity, Peter. This war will not be won with bullets and tanks, but on the pages of newspapers and on the flat plasma TV screens shining over every soft, overstuffed American couch. And you’re going to help us win it.”

  He didn’t look up. The razor blades were coming. And with a sick pit of recognition in his stomach, Johnson suddenly realized, she knew all about the razor blades. And didn’t care. Wanted him to piss himself. Cry and beg. And yes, in front of the predatory Sheik Kutmar. And suddenly he knew—yes, he would cry and beg. And there was nothing he could do about it.

  She wriggled forward in her chair and leaned toward him, her pretty olive finger pointing at him like a weapon: “Now tell me exactly who sent you. Give us everything.”

  And Peter Johnson, clumsy assassin, tried his best.

  Josephine Parker von Hildebrand ran the media operation, working with Giselle and her fellow Johnson exes, Françoise Ducat and Elizabeth Richards. She knew all the cable news producers and made a point of doing them favors that made them beholden to her at times like these—not that they all weren’t eager to get a piece of the story anyway. Jo von H flew the second of the Mrs. Johnsons, Françoise Ducat, Giselle’s mother, in from Paris that very morning. There were statements that had to be made, pleas if you will, and Peter’s family gathered in one city to make them the following day.

  For the 8 AM group news conference, Josephine used her own apartment—nowhere better. The four women sat together on one couch, expanding on their collective statement: “We appeal to the government of Iran, and the president of Iran, to please let us have him home safe. To all who know Peter, who know his passion for the truth and for international understanding, keep him in your prayers for a safe return home.”

  Then Jo von H covered her bases, sending each of the three women to three different outlets and reserving the evening news—should the networks get interested—for herself. First Giselle to Fox with hostess Megyn Kelly at the top of the 9 AM hour. Quick-witted, likable, and loved with a passion by the camera, if Kelly couldn’t make Giselle look smart and sympathetic, nobody could.

  “You look like you’re handling this pretty well. If it was my father, my husband, I’m not sure I’d be able to cope.”

  Giselle looked like she was dealing, just barely. “I’d be lying if I told you I’m not terrified. If he can hear me, just know I love you, Dad. And we’re doing everything we can to bring you home. Everything. I swear.”

  Then Giselle’s mom, Françoise Ducat, over at The View, where Joy Behar pounced on what she considered the most consequential aspect of the story:

  “So do you think that this administration is going to try to make use of this . . . ?”

  Elisabeth Hasselbeck began to try to interrupt. Behar didn’t relent: “Please, please. Now do you think this administration is going to try to exploit this tragedy to say that there’s something wrong with the Iranians?”

  Applause and appreciative nods from the audience.

  “Deeze Government Americain is the most arrogant in the world,” Françoise said, perched on the couch between Behar and Barbara Walters. “At war wiz everyone, lying to everyone, acting bad bully every chance. And when ze world become mad at les États Unis, misunderstandings are made to happen. Made, do you understand? Not accident.”

  “What do you say to the Iranians?” Walters asked.

  “I can say, you make mistake. Peter is good man. He love Iran; he love the people and always wanted to tell their story. It’s better if your story comes to us by him.”

  “And to the administration here?”

  “Peter’s life in your hands. What you do and what you do not do. If ze world, if Iran know it have nossing to fear from ze U.S., Peter will come home. Every day he stay, we know who to blame.”

  That night, the urbane Elizabeth Richards headed to CNN so Anderson Cooper could give her the furrowed-brow treatment.

  “Welcome, Beth. Now even though you’re divorced, both of you are close, you especially with his daughter, Giselle. As you know, we had him on CNN not ten days ago. I’m going to play a clip of that interview on Larry King Live, where Peter Johnson says the Iranian nuke is nowhere near complete, or even planned for that matter. But first, is there anything you’d like to say to the president, to the administration, to the secretary of state?”

  And here the smart Metropolitan Curator got her whammy in: “Of course, I’d like to know why the United States can’t have diplomatic relations with Iran? Not one office in Tehran, not one desk, not one telephone? Why not? What’s wrong with talking? Can someone tell me that?”

  Giving Cooper the chance to smack the ball back over the net:

  “Which makes me want to ask, has anyone from the administration, anyone at all been in contact with you?”

  Scandalized, “This administration? First they promise to talk. Then when something comes up, something real, they do nothing. Nothing’s changed—nothing!”

  Cooper looked very, very concerned.

  Days later. Two? Three? Johnson lost track. The interrogation room had become his world. He heard the sound of traffic beyond the blinded window, now much dimmer with long spaces between batches of cars. He wasn’t sure of the time, but it felt like night.

  While time divided into long periods—first endless spells before the light, the table, the video, question after question; then much shorter periods of sleep on a mattress in a windowless empty holding cell. A little plate of unmentionable food, plastic bottles of water that tasted of copper and chlorine, a shallow pot to relieve himself. The razors passed, leaving him weak and shaky but not yelling every time he pissed. And two out of the four intervals between interrogations, they beat him. Mostly about the soles of his naked feet with a sharp reed that bloodied them. Then the hood came back on, and they marched him to the interrogation room with the sound of traffic beyond—on the fifth day shuffling slower and slower as his feet refused to hold him.

  He answered every question the Sheik and Yasmine put to him, so the beatings couldn’t be about that. Just something to amuse the guards. From what he could tell none of them spoke English, but it didn’t matter. When the door cracked open, he’d jump from the mattress as if stung, then huddle in the corner. And when the first hand touched him, he yelled—without even the first blow. Sometimes one of them would just flick his ear with a thumb and forefinger.

  Then their laughter, mocking his cowardice. Yes, they did beat him for fun.

  Now in the interrogation room the sound of footsteps reached his chair, coming from behind. And the sack came off. They didn’t bother tying him any more. What would be the point?

  Sheik Kutmar sat behind the table with the video recording light shining into his face. Thanks for having me on, Larry.

  “Let’s talk about Robert Wallets, again.” This, from Sheik Kutmar.

  “He works for Banquo, late thirties, some kind of soldier, maybe Special Forces. Took me into the field for extra training. He was my primary interrogator at the firm.”

  “What kind of training?”

  “Survival camping and some small arms. But not in a desert—in the mountains of North Carolina, the woods. About a mile or two from a supplemental training area for the 10th Mountain Division. He might have been part of them, but I can’t say for sure.”

  Yasmine rose from the desk and thrust some photos into Johnson’s lap. “Which one?” she demanded thickly.

  He flipped quickly through them, but none of them looked like Wallets.
/>   “Sorry.”

  “And the woman?” Kutmar asked.

  “Marjorie Morningstar. An assumed name. Again late thirties, sort of butch.”

  “Butch?” Kutmar asked.

  “Not feminine,” Yasmine explained.

  “Strong, like a peasant woman.” Johnson added.

  “Any of these?”

  Kutmar showed him more photos. A femme French masseuse. A stolid Spanish factory worker with meaty hands. A tough-looking prison guard from some Eastern European bastion with her hair in a severe bun. Johnson shook his head.

  “No, sorry. She was American, raised in the area. Some kind of local mountain girl—but with education, college, master’s, maybe even a PhD.”

  “Can you identify the Jew?” Yasmine loved the word Jew; you could see how well it tasted on her tongue.

  “Nobody’s quite sure about his pedigree.” Johnson said dryly. More photos in his lap. Johnson flipped through them, discarding the thin faces, concentrating on the heavy-set balding ones. There were three possibles that looked like the Turk; then he narrowed them down to two. He showed those two.

  “Could be one of these. Can’t say for sure. These men have beards. He didn’t have a beard when I saw him. Maybe. Hard to tell—”

  Yasmine took the photos back. Discarded one as irrelevant; the other man in the second photo she knew. From his place in the chair Johnson couldn’t see which photo was discarded.

  “And the fourth man in the little play they put on for you?” Yasmine asked.