Johnson felt a pit in his stomach. He had ostensibly escaped Yasmine and Kutmar but was not rid of them truly, not if they were going to become international media darlings. He thought he was supposed to be the media whore. A mere four minutes earlier Jo von H had left a voice message on his answering machine. The UN was sponsoring the young Iranian physicist and her mentor, Dr. Yahdzi, on a trip to the United States. In a coup de théâtre she’d snagged the right to sponsor the first American press avail, beating out the big guys. Apparently the Iranians liked The Crusader’s coverage. Tomorrow 10 AM. The Josephine von Hildebrand apartment. Be there.
Perfect. Life imitates Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 Dadaesque sculpture Fountain. An upside down urinal. Sure, he’d be there and try not to piss on himself.
Giselle came out of her bedroom, paused near the couch, and stared at him gazing stupidly into his laptop. Finally he noticed her.
“Hi. Sorry—dreaming.”
“You’ve been doing a lot of that lately.” That sounded harsh to his daughter’s ears, and she softened it some: “I mean, after everything—”
There was nothing to forgive. “I understand.”
Giselle seemed to fret over some decision. Something she wanted to ask him. “Feel like—feel like coming to dinner tonight?”
He knew what she meant.
Il Monello on 2nd Avenue and 76th Street was one of those top-end neighborhood restaurants that make Manhattan the envy of the dining world. Seating fewer than sixty people, a troop of small tables along couched walls, under nine-foot flat matte ceilings. With a few more tables in the middle. But what the place lacked in elbow room, it made up for in the whiteness of its linen and the polish of its service. There wasn’t much space to hang over tables and gossip. If you came to a place like this, you were seated to be served. The acoustics were unobtrusive, the voices of those at supper gently cascading over one another. Not like in those cavernous ugly modern places where you couldn’t hear yourself think. Here you could say, “Pass the salt,” and your dining companion would actually hear you.
Anton was already seated when Giselle and Johnson arrived, but rose like a gentleman and held the chair for the young lady. In twenty minutes they were most of the way through an excellent Chianti, the appetizers of grilled shrimp Fra Diavolo and carpaccio devoured while Johnson couldn’t remember what pasta he’d ordered. Oh that’s right, parpadelle, bow ties with pancetta, broccoli rabe, and pine nuts. A feast for a king. But he didn’t feel like a king this evening. More of a hovering wasp, waiting for the chance to sting.
It took all Johnson’s self-control not to sling his wineglass into Anton’s face; the indulgence with which he treated Giselle and unctuous yet easy way he sucked up to Daddy Peter—knowing all the while the smooth shit was buddies with the Brooklyn train riders. Almost too much to tolerate.
Suddenly the mood was broken when a voice came at them from the bar. “Anton! Peter!” A buttery voice with a slight accent. Belgian. Nederlandisher. And for the first time in years Johnson saw his old bribe master; the blond head of Jan Breuer bobbed at them from across the restaurant. His cheeks slightly florid with drink. Johnson wondered just how much a man had to drink to get those veins in his face. God, he’d done his share, more than enough to get a spider web or two of varicose blood vessels that grew livid with every glass he knocked back. The scent of cigarettes preceded the Belgian oil man, the odor saturating him from suit to skin.
“Jan! Amazing!” Johnson reached across the table with his hand.
“Indeed, my friend.” Then to the Frenchman, “Anton, I’d heard you were assigned to New York.”
The three of them had an extra seat. “Care to join us?”
The mildly drunk Dutchman accepted. “For a moment or two—my clients are late.” Anton seemed a little put out to see the man, as if some business between them hadn’t turned out so well. Saying, “You’re looking well, Jan.”
The middle-aged Belgian Big Oil consultant rumbled in his throat. Then coughed softly, a grisly nicotine cough. “Nice of you to say so. But I’m not.” Then Johnson noticed the gray pallor about his eyes, the deepening blue circles. “I’m afraid my Marlboros finally caught up with me,” Jan Breuer said. “Then sort of traveled up,” he pointed to his head. “It’s gone to my brain now, and as everyone knows, I was never so smart that I could afford to lose much of it.”
All at once Johnson felt terrible. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your email this afternoon. I was planning to; of course, if I’d known—” Babbling. But Jan Breuer laughed and waved his apology away.
“You didn’t. Let’s plan on something tomorrow. No time like the present, eh?”
“Indeed,” Johnson agreed. Suddenly glad to do it. Never mind the preposterous coincidence of seeing Jan in the restaurant. Sure the fantastic appearance nagged him, but seeing the dead man walking changed everything. Maybe that was the point. Maybe Jan contacted him after all these years to show him how it all came to an end. The final outcome. The one-way ticket paid in cash, no baggage. Nothing to declare.
“Ah!” Jan Breuer’s eyes flashed at the door. Some people waved through the windows of the restaurant. He downed his drink. “My guests. We’re going somewhere else. Peter, see you tomorrow, anywhere you choose. Anton, perhaps you’ll see me too if time permits. And when you do, allow me to make amends.”
At this Anton merely nodded but neither rose nor extended his hand for a farewell handclasp.
Before the man had gone five steps, Anton grimaced into his endive salad. Then hissed, “Good riddance. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving charlatan.”
Giselle was scandalized at her beau’s callousness. “Anton!”
“It’s true!” Anton shot back with an ugly flash of the eyes.
Now Johnson was curious. “What did he do?”
Anton snorted. “It was so complicated I’m not sure I can even explain it to myself. Suffice it to say, he deposited some funds that weren’t his to handle. And worse than that, of questionable origin. Before long EU bank inspectors of various nations were knocking on our doors. The bank will have nothing to do with him now. I mean Bank Luxembourg isn’t exactly House of Rothschild.”
Then with some clicking of gears and the tic-toc of his mind, Anton addressed Johnson as mildly as possible: “How did you know him, Peter?”
Peter Johnson sighed, found the rest of the Chianti, poured it into his glass. Knowing he had nothing to lose but truth itself said just as mildly back: “I let him bribe me once.” Then thought better of it. “No, actually about four times.”
There was something incredibly liberating about being beaten on the soles of your feet, tortured for days, pissing needles on a wall, and then crawling over bitter mountains under the specter of Apache gunships. Now Giselle’s eyes pierced him, rotten angry at Daddy’s admitting such a thing before her boyfriend. Though she held her tongue.
For his part, Anton couldn’t. Somehow Johnson knew in his gut Frenchie’s high dudgeon was pure dog ’n’ pony, and tried not to sneer.
“Oh, come now, Peter—you didn’t really?”
But the Euro-weenie Romeo’s act was cut short. A honking horn from 2nd Avenue blasted through the restaurant, along with a flash of headlights through the high front windows of the establishment. The squeal of brakes, a grinding crash.
Half the customers leapt to their feet, the sound of women gasping, and a whole platter of hot antipasti fell from a waiter’s hands to the carpeted floor with a steaming wet slap. Johnson found himself clawing his way to the door of the restaurant. He smelled Anton’s cologne hard behind.
The east side of 2nd Avenue at 76th Street was a mess. A couple of car lengths from the restaurant, a yellow medallion taxicab had jumped the curb and hit a glass and stainless-steel bus shelter, cascading broken glass in every direction. The cabbie stood in the street by his taxi, waving his hands and holding his head at the same time. “Green light! Green light! My eyes! My eyes!” as though he’d been temporarily blinded. He was
a Sikh with full beard and saffron-colored turban; as his sight quickly cleared, the sorrow poured from him as the man realized everything he’d ever worked for, now sacrificed to the Manhattan Traffic Jinn. The Jinn had destroyed a perfectly innocent MTA bus shelter, and he stumbled about the wreck in dazed confusion. The poor man had to be restrained by pedestrians from trying to drag the roof of the bus shelter from the roof of his cab. The whole thing threatening to collapse.
But Johnson saw two things. First was that the dead man walking who hailed from the Netherlands—no longer walking. Just dead. Lying a few steps from the restaurant door. His head leaked a thread of blood from a small hole near the temple. So they wouldn’t get together after all. Jan’s guests wrung their hands, one middle-aged woman in a lurid pink pashmina scarf cried, “He just fell down, fell down, fell down,” over and over like some kind of mantra.
The second thing he saw was the dancing green dot of a laser light pointer. “Green light! My eyes!” It danced across the sidewalk for a moment near Jan’s body. When Johnson traced the light out of the corner of his eye, scanning the street, he located the source on the sixth-story roof balustrade of a brownstone building across 2nd Avenue. Yet even as he looked, the bright green Tinker Bell fairy light vanished from the rooftop. But what struck Johnson was the flash of a man’s head as it withdrew.
He couldn’t see the face or make even the vaguest identification, but still it felt strangely familiar. A man’s head he knew. Yossi the Turk? He banished the thought. The man had been left hooked up to a respirator in a German military hospital. Now sniping on 2nd Avenue? A flush of worry went through Johnson—about the state of his own mind.
A kind hand touched his sleeve. Giselle. “Dad, let’s go home.”
Anton, very pale faced, stood on the sidewalk staring at the late Belgian.
“Is that okay with you?” Johnson asked him.
A shaken Anton nodded. He’d never seen a man like that before. Probably never seen anyone die up close. But they couldn’t just walk away. Police arrived and started taking statements, names and addresses for later. Like everyone else, Johnson had seen precious little from the restaurant. What he’d seen afterwards, on the other hand, he didn’t want to try to explain. But he’d be damned if he wouldn’t tell Wallets all about it.
Thirty minutes later the cops let them go. Ten blocks downtown the city flowed around them like nothing happened. Anton broke their pensive silence.
“Peter,” he mumbled. “Peter—I’d like to ask you a favor. Is that all right?”
Johnson stared at the Euro-weenie.
“Talk to me.”
Anton seemed at a loss of manhood. He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets, eyes flitting from corner to corner as though afraid they were being watched; no, just normal New York traffic . . . then screwed up the courage. “I’d like you to make a deposit for me.”
At which Johnson gave him a long, searching look, weighing his options. Then replied, “Let’s talk tomorrow. I’ve got that press conference The Crusader is hosting, and need to prep.”
Back in the Brooklyn apartment Johnson sat with his daughter as they watched the late-night news. Something about them sitting side by side on the couch watching TV always comforted Giselle. This last episode, the accident on the street, seemed to have filled her with dread, resurrecting all the chaotic feelings from the Iran time. As if those troubles followed Johnson all the way back home.
“It’ll be all right,” he tried to assure her.
“But you knew him.” A reproach.
And Peter could only shrug in resigned admission. “Yes,” he told her, “I did.”
The last thing Johnson saw on TV that night was a little-noticed three-day-old story of bureaucratic bungling that was explained away and forgotten within a week. In Nogales, Arizona, some Mexican drug dealers overran an Arizona National Guard checkpoint somewhere out in the desert. Dozens of shots, even a Vietnam-era M-72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon fired and thrown in a ditch—the familiar hollow green tube a silent yet eloquent testament to United States border insanity. Rules of engagement clearly stated no Arizona National Guardsman could fire back, even when fired upon.
As the Arizona National Guard retreated behind their vehicles, the drug dealers proceeded merrily on their way into the heartland of America. What no one ascertained for certain was the identity of these Mexican drug runners or where they were headed. No matter. The next day politicians of every stripe continued to celebrate themselves in their particular ways. Some postured on the cable shows about the dangers of transfats in corn chips, while others called for safer kiddy-kar kid seats. In a fit of statesmanship, Bangor, Maine, banned smoking in privately owned cars with children in them. Finally: kids in Bangor, Maine, were safe from second-hand smoke.
That night, as Johnson tried to sleep a restless sleep, some eyes slept not at all. Wesson, Bryce, and Smith sat in their slightly chilly sedan in a parking lot. But not just any old parking lot—the nearly infinite Autostan at the King of Prussia Mall in eastern Pennsylvania.
Smith was at the wheel and Bryce in the passenger’s seat this time around. Relegated to the backseat, Wesson didn’t like her spot. Around 9:30 PM, Bryce had made the incredibly stupid mistake of repeatedly calling the backseat of the sedan the Ladies’ Lounge, or the Kiddies’ Section, and now Wesson ate from a pound bag of pistachio nuts, eating the nutmeat and periodically tossing the shells at the back of Bryce’s head. At first he’d said, “Will you please cut that out?” But every few minutes, ping! another shell bounced off his neck. One even found its way down his collar. His misery knew no bounds. But he knew enough not to say a word when Smith casually remarked, “Y ’know while we’re here, we should really pick up some panty hose.”
And Wesson popped her cell phone. “Yeah, lemme call to see if Ann Taylor’s still open.”
Bryce bit his tongue with the words, Yeah, go ahead, so I can strangle you . . .
“They’re open. Hey, Bryce you want to go for us? Go on a panty run?”
At the wheel Smith guffawed. “Make mine champagne nude.”
Ping! went another pistachio shell on the back of his neck. “Anything I can do to help.” But suddenly the whole bag of nuts hit the backseat, and Wesson had her night vision binoculars up to her eyes.
“Shut up, shut up—there she is!”
Smith and Bryce could see their mark with the naked eye. Farah Nasir. The mysterious female voice at the end of the “Polak” call back in New York. Junior service officer, Iranian Mission to the United Nations. “Little Miss Strange.” She seemed to take a lot of phone calls from guys in Brooklyn and Queens. Very short phone calls that started with nonsense like, “Polak” or “Klimteh” and ended with “Right” or “Fine.” Her BMW had pulled up door-to-door with a black Lincoln Continental, favorite of car services and one indistinguishable from the next.
“Call in Big Bird,” Smith barked. “If they take off in different directions we’re going to lose them.”
And Wesson got on the phone to the Pennsylvania State Police. The traffic copter was on the way.
As it turned out, the Lincoln followed the Beemer out of the parking lot and headed north out Goddard Boulevard around the world headquarters of Lockheed Martin. The PA State Police chopper phoned in to inform them there was some confusion as to whether the airspace over the aerospace company was restricted.
Wesson hung up on them in disgust with the words, “All right, forget it!”
In a half mile they still hadn’t lost either the Beemer or the Lincoln, as Goddard Boulevard finally ran out and the two cars turned north on Gulph Road, exiting almost as soon as they got on and parking in the Sheraton Park Ridge Hotel and Conference Center right across from the Valley Forge Golf Course.
Smith ran the Lincoln’s plates. Arizona. “Nogales DMV has it registered to Pedro Livery of Nogales. And we’ve got a parking receipt from the golf course. It’s been sitting here two days. They charged it to the livery service.”
; “Yeah, they would charge it. Avoid cash at all costs. Leaving a big black Lincoln sitting around in a parking garage might get you red-flagged from Homeland Security, like there’s a bomb in it or something.” This from Wesson.
“So what are they carrying?” Bryce wondered out loud.
A little more patience brought them the answer.
Nothing. Yet. But that changed.
After ten minutes of scanning the surrounding area, they saw the bobbing lights of a golf cart appear out from a band of trees. The shiny white cart was driving off the course. It cruised around a sand trap, then a water hazard. In the dark, the sound of its electric motor whirring grew closer and closer. Finally the cart bobbed onto a Valley Forge/Sheraton access path and crossed over into the parking lot. Then pulled in front of the Conference Center behind a row of ten golf carts.
Wesson’s cell rang. “PA State Police want to know if we want a SWAT take down? They’ve got a SWAT chopper hovering out by the third hole.” Apparently there wasn’t any restriction over the golf course. Smith spat back one word. “No.” Then thought better to add, “Thank you.” The G-Gals and their Boy Toy were all staring at the same thing.
The Valley Forge golf cart: it carried six golf bags.
And in twenty seconds one man from the Lincoln Continental had stowed them in the Lincoln’s trunk. In another twenty seconds the Beemer and Lincoln were headed north on Interstate 276—heading home to good old New York City.
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