Banquo's Ghosts

by Richard Lowry

  As they headed closer to Manhattan, the group began to thin out. The first to peel off did so at the Jackson Heights station: a confluence of four different lines all heading to or leading from the heart of the city. Johnson saw a stray kid scoot off to Flushing Meadows and Corona Park, toward the site of the 1964 World’s Fair—heading out to an extremity of the system once more.

  Back in Manhattan the group lost three more Hood Heads at the 51st Street and Lexington Avenue station—of course, the IRT. Johnson thought he had figured some of it out now. From the 51st Street station those three could travel uptown the length of the swank Upper East Side to the Bronx: Wakefield, Eastchester, and Pelham. More extremities.

  By the time Johnson’s train reached Columbus Circle in Manhattan on the corner of Central Park, only the first Hood Head and Anton were left. They clasped hands and did a slight chest bump, then went their separate ways. Anton back to the Red Line whence he’d started. Sure, that made sense. He could travel the tony Upper West Side, either way up to Van Courtland Park or downtown to South Ferry, hopping off at Christopher Street. Johnson didn’t bother following him.

  It was the other guy who counted. Right, of course, he made directly for the Orange B Line. Brooklyn, the only borough they’d avoided. By riding the subway this way, the men had traversed nearly the whole system, going out each arm of the starfish and returning to its heart. The only major line they missed served Brighton Beach and Coney Island. Brooklyn. Safe at home base? And that came last. But what it all meant, who the hell knew. Would the B & D snoops have seen something he missed? Doubtful.

  Johnson rode in the far end of the car away from his mark, his mind spinning with all the possibilities and occasionally getting caught up in the cobwebs of fatigue. He noticed a kid sitting across from him and briefly worried about falling asleep and getting rolled again. The kid kept catching his eye, then looking away. He wore baggy jeans, work-boots, a bandana, and a Sean John T-shirt.

  Relieved to be off the train, a bleary-eyed Johnson emerged from the New Utrecht station with his target about 4 AM as the sky lightened the low buildings of central working-class Brooklyn and a few very early birds began to chirp. People were getting ready for the day—the city’s dawn patrol. And in a surprisingly brief three and a half minutes Johnson managed to lose his mark as the man walked along the sidewalk into the deeper regions of the neighborhood. Though he’d realized as much subconsciously throughout his long subway trip, this hammered the point home: During rush hour, a guy like this was virtually invisible in the crush of thousands.

  In the end, he stood wanly in the middle of the block of a residential street. Yeah, the guy might have gone into that row house. Or was it that set of dumpy apartments? The one with the blind windows?

  He heard a familiar city sound: the doors of a panel van opening. Turning to look, a few cars down a guy in a San Diego Padres cap had opened the door to his food service delivery wagon, Hung Fat Oriental Food Distributors—Long Island City. They were a long way from Long Island City.

  Somebody waved at him from the dark of the van and hissed pssssst! Wallets. “Oh for Chrissakes, stop standing there like a jackass and get in.”

  Inside, the van was comfortably warm but a little stuffy. Johnson found a stool by a console. “Don’t touch anything,” someone said. Must have been the guy who opened the van doors. He couldn’t really see the faces, people he hadn’t met yet.

  “Are you trying to be conspicuous?” Wallets growled. “Why don’t you just sneak around in a trench coat and fedora? Like Spy vs. Spy.”

  Then the door slid open once more, and the kid from the train hopped in. Johnson visibly started, and Wallets smiled, “I’d introduce Cedric, but you’ve already met.”

  Johnson looked confused, but something stirred in the deep mists of his memory.

  Cedric laughed and said, “Brooklyn Heights.”

  Johnson let out a long, “Ohhh . . . ”

  “Cedric kindly returned your credit cards that night, remember?” Wallets said. “We kept in touch, and now he helps with odd tasks in the city. He was following your Workbench Boy, but might I add, doing it with little risk of being noticed.”

  Cedric laughed again, and Johnson joined in, until an exasperated voice barked at him, “Don’t lean on that!” The guy in the Padres cap.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Dirty Polak

  Bryce and Smith sat in a grey sedan parked across from a new place in Queens, occupied by another set of Workbench Boys. The entire team had been following the various Ibns, Sadrs, Walids, and so forth like scattering pigeons hither and yon. Now the two agents parked off Queens Boulevard down the street from one of those cheesy row houses with fake siding and chain-link fencing enclosing a postage-stamp patch of grass. Old-fashioned visual surveillance. Time-consuming and boring. They had the whole place wired for sound and a receiver in their car to pick up landline conversations. Heck, nobody could use the Hung Fat van for everything. Besides which, even the dullest marks would eventually notice something like a huge ice cream truck parked in their neighborhood everyday. Ding-a-ling-a-ling: suspected racketeers and money launderers and terrorists, come and get your orange Popsicles and sno-cones.

  Bryce sat in the driver’s seat with his two hands on the wheel, like he was still driving. He had always found it hard to be natural around attractive women, and spending hours alone with Smith taxed even his prodigious capacities for awkwardness. She was one of those girls who was always shocked when someone said she was beautiful, but shouldn’t have been. She was a redhead, with freckled porcelain white skin that showed her emotions in hues from faint pink when she laughed to beet red when she was embarrassed—which wasn’t very often, except when someone called her beautiful.

  She was one of five children, the youngest and the only daughter. So she had tomboy informality to her, just one of the guys, notwithstanding her high cheekbones, nice jaw line, and delicate nose that made men want to get lost in her sparkling, light-blue eyes. Not to mention her slender in-shape figure of a dedicated jogger and kickboxer. Today was a pantsuit day, so she had her right foot up on the dashboard and played with the radio dial with her left hand, switching from one hip-hop station to another, softly singing along to songs she liked and expounding to Bryce about the relative merits of the artists and their work. “Sure, Jay-Z might still sell, but he’s lost his edge. Then again, why does he need his edge when he’s dating Beyoncé, every man’s dream, eh, Bryce?”

  Bryce knew as little about the hip-hop scene as he did about gumshoe detective work, so he compensated for his inability to make conversation by seeming as absorbed as possible in watching the front door of this row house, feeling more and more like a stiff, holding the steering wheel tighter and tighter.

  “Jay-Z? Beyoncé?” Smith teased. “Come on! You don’t follow them? You don’t even read Page Six do you?”

  “No, but I get the idea,” he said. “Like the Federal Page in the Washington Post, right?”

  She shook her head—“You’re hopeless”—and turned the radio up.

  At that, the little speaker between their seats crackled: a dial tone and then the sharp beeps of someone hitting the numbers of a phone. Smith turned the radio back down. Lil Wayne would have to wait. The sound of a phone ringing and then a woman answering in a foreign language. A male voice said, “Hello,” in English, and she switched to English too.

  It was Abdullah, the only Workbench Boy in the Queens house at the moment, making a call.

  “The polak is ready,” he said.

  “Good,” she said, and hung up.

  Dial tone again.

  Bryce and Smith looked at one another. “The polak?” Smith said. “That’s odd,” Bryce replied. Smith’s cell phone rang. Bryce heard her end of the conversation: “Of course I heard that . . . Yeah . . . Mmmhmmm . . . You got it.” She flipped her clamshell phone shut. “It was O’Hanlon. He’s got his buns in a bunch over that call. Said it’s the kind of code that could mean the s
tart of something. We’re to stick on Abdullah tight, really tight, and if we get the wrong feeling, forget about the surveillance, and just bring him in. That ‘polak’ stuff makes him real nervous.”

  Just as she finished, Abdullah bounded down the steps and jumped into his car. Bryce’s hands got even tighter around the steering wheel, and now he wasn’t even thinking of Smith.

  Abdullah drove a used Volvo of the sort you’d expect a sociology professor at Bowdoin to drive. They followed him from a distance through Queens’ back streets, lined with scraggly urban trees struggling to make their way in a world of concrete, exhaust, and dog crap. The rundown brownstones they passed were quiet, the kids at school and the adults, most of them at least, at work. They made their way to the inaptly named Utopia Parkway, a four-lane road with a concrete divider and trash-strewn brown shrubbery at its sides. One of New York’s grimy thoroughfares, a nowhere everyone always forgot on their way to someplace else—Oakland with some white dashed lines down the middle.

  The G-Babe’s phone rang again. She unclamped it—“Smith”—not taking her eyes off the road. This time it was Wallets.

  “Where are you headed?” he asked, without bothering to announce himself.

  “North on Utopia, less than ten minutes away from the house,” she said.

  “Where you think he’s going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He hung up on her.

  “Wallets?” Bryce ventured.

  “Yeah,” Smith said, clamping her phone shut again. “His panty hose are in a bunch too.”

  She included Bryce among the men with twisted hose, though his uptightness wasn’t anything new, more congenital, a factor of over-breeding. And his driving reflected it, trying so hard to do the “perfect” tail job, hanging three or four cars back, easier now that there were fewer lights and the highway broadened out to accommodate more traffic. Abdullah got in the right lane, headed toward an exit underneath a big green highway sign with white lettering that flashed by too fast to read. Bryce was blocked from changing lanes, leaned on the horn, and swerved, muscling his way in front of a car with shiny hubcaps and tinted windows. “Take it easy,” Smith said, craning her neck to look ahead. “We still got him.”

  They merged onto the LIE. For anyone west of Manhattan: the Long Island Expressway. The word “express” a total misnomer. The Volvo well ahead, but still in sight, as they headed toward LaGuardia, jumping from the expressway to the Cross Island Parkway with the oval of Citi Field, home of the Mets, visible in the distance. The G-Babe couldn’t help musing, “Can you believe that before they tore it down, Shea was the third oldest stadium in the National League? Hard to believe, huh? Friggin’ Shea had become a classic.” As usual, Bryce had nothing to say to her, since he knew less about baseball than he did about hip-hop. He kept half an eye on the Volvo as he focused on the cars around him, trying to weave to a better position to catch up. Smith said soothingly, “You’re all right. We still got him.”

  Then they heard distant sirens. Bryce looked in the rearview mirror and saw a bank of spinning cherry lights headed up behind him. “Damn, where’s the fire?”

  “Watch him—watch him!” Smith warned. Abdullah headed to an exit that led to either LaGuardia’s cargo areas or the local service streets adjacent to the runways. As they approached the airport, Bryce saw a milling crowd congregating outside the US Air terminal. The mob seemed to be streaming out the main doors at the Arrivals curb. “Busy day?” Smith wondered. They followed Abdullah to the exit, when a white police sedan appeared and parked directly across the road leading off the highway, lights flashing. Abdullah in his Volvo cruised harmlessly past just as the Airport Police decided to set up a checkpoint. Now the cop car blocked their way; Bryce hit the brakes. No choice but to stop.

  “Now what?” Smith jumped out of the car and slammed the door behind her. The cop hopped out of his vehicle at the same time and stood in the roadway. Smith approached and flashed her badge. “FBI. We need to get through.” Then quickly sized up the copper—young, strong Italian features—the kind she could have sweet-talked out of a ticket or out of his pants. “Sorry, Ma’am, no one goes through,” the cop said.

  Ma’am? Ma’am? Don’t mammie me, she thought. “What’s the deal?”

  “Incident at the terminal,” he said, hitching one of his hands on his belt and talking into his walkie-talkie after it belched a burst of static talk. Quack, quack. Didn’t copy. Come on back?

  Smith walked back toward the car, and her phone rang. “Yeah?”

  “Where is he?” Wallets asked, again with no introduction.

  “I don’t know,” she said, wincing.

  “Really? ” Wallets grunted, incredulous. “Well, do you know where you are?”

  Screw off, Smith thought, but told him where they’d been stopped. “There’s something going on at Arrivals.”

  “I know. US Air,” Wallets informed her. “I’ll be there in about five,” and hung up.

  Back in the car with Bryce, Smith saw the preppie had turned the radio to the local news station—1010 WINS. A deep newscaster’s voice: “We are now getting word of security incidents at all three metropolitan airports. LaGuardia Airport is being evacuated. There has been an unspecified breach at JFK, and we also understand that there is a disturbance at Newark International. Stay tuned to 1010 WINS for all the latest, weather, and traffic on the tens. And now let’s go to 1010 WINS reporter Steve Marigold for the latest on this developing situation, live from LaGuardia Airport.”

  “Live? Live? How’d he get there so fast?” Smith asked. Bryce shrugged; as an out-of-towner he didn’t quite grasp the immense feat of traveling the three miles from Midtown to Queens at midday in New York City. But slowly it came to him.

  “Somebody tip him off?”

  Smith bumped her head with her hand in a mock “I coulda had a V-8” gesture of revelation and snarked at Bryce, “Yah think?”

  Against a cacophony of crowd noise and sirens, the reporter belted out his story: “The scene is chaos outside LaGuardia Airport this afternoon, a facility that takes in and handles nearly seventy thousand travelers a day is now disgorging them right back outside the terminal doors. Confusion and fear reigns, as alarms sounded ten minutes ago and security personnel ordered people to leave. One woman told me just minutes ago: ‘I was at the ticket counter when they started shouting, “Everyone out, everyone out!” and I knew it was serious when the ticket agents started leaving too.’ That is the story amid the throngs outside LaGuardia Airport. Steve Marigold, 1010 WINS.”

  Smith turned the radio back down. From the rearview mirror, a black Lincoln sedan approached around the single file of cars stuck behind him, two of its wheels running off into the grass of the shoulder. Who else? Wallets.

  The man got out of his car and charged toward the cop. It took all of about twenty seconds for the cop to jump into his driver’s seat and, without bothering to close the door, back it up enough for all of them to drive through. Open sesame, as if no obstacle could withstand the force of Wallets’ will. The roadblock closed behind them.

  For a moment, the two cars idled side by side, as Wallets spoke through his passenger window, his left hand on the wheel and his right thrown over the passenger seat. Since Bryce and Smith didn’t know which way Abdullah had gone—into the airport or into the local streets—Wallets said they’d go toward the airport. “If he’s not there,” Wallets said, “at least we know he’s not in the middle of whatever’s happening here right now, and we can try to catch up to him later.”

  They drove down through the cargo area: chain-link fences, snout-nosed four-wheelers—almost like off-terrain vehicles—pulling square steel boxes on wheels behind them. More steel boxes stacked twelve feet high. Guys in baggy gray jumpsuits with the orange ear protectors. Away from the runways and jet wash, the Mickey Mouse ears hung around their necks. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. No sign of the Volvo or Abdullah. Wallets signaled to Bryce to keep following him, and they he
aded by a single-lane one-way extension road toward the airport itself.

  Another cop car blocked the way. Wallets got out, and once again, presto, they were through. They looped around and up a ramp to get to the Continental departure area, the outside of which was thronged with milling passengers, aimless and befuddled in the slanting sunshine of a fall afternoon. They stood with their roller-bag handles extended, exhibiting the world-weary nonchalance of New Yorkers who always expect the worst, especially when it comes to inconvenience. Wallets was anything but complacent. He slammed his car in a no-parking zone, waved off another cop, and marched up to Bryce’s rolled-down window.

  “You guys wait here in the car in case you have to jump somewhere quickly. I’m going inside.” His crew cut weaved through the crowd, and then, after another instant cop conversation, he vanished round a wide revolving door and into the terminal.

  Smith’s phone rang again. “Smith,” she said. This time, O’Hanlon. “So you guys lost Abdul the Tool?”

  “Kind of you to notice.”

  “Anything blown up yet?”

  “Not that we can tell from here. Just a lot of bumped passengers smoking cigarettes by the curb.”

  “I’m headed back to the Workbench Boys’ house in Queens for a look-see.”

  O’Hanlon’s impatient, Smith thought. Impatience caused mistakes—slipups like risking a search in broad daylight with the neighbors watching. Bad idea. Problem was, first time around when they’d tailed the lads to Brooklyn and the New Utrecht Avenue apartment walk-up, Jordan the Hung Fat Tech had never gone inside after their single sweep under the door. Their Sniffer showed no evidence of explosives. Or radiation. None. Nada. Then the surveillance had traipsed halfway across Queens to stare at grimy row houses. But nobody’d gotten a Sniffer under there yet at all, just some wiretaps.