Banquo's Ghosts (24 page)

Sheik Kutmar lit a cigarette and poured some coffee from a stainless-steel thermos into two matching chrome cups. No cup for Johnson.

“We checked your account in the Cantonal Bank of Zurich with the number you gave us. You were initially bribed for $75,000 many years ago. Now you say it stands roughly at $250,000.”

The Sheik took a drag on the cigarette, letting out a long serpent of smoke. “The man, Jan Breuer, who paid you the bribe to write about the Gulf War—where did you meet him?”

“At a party in Westchester County, north of Manhattan, at the Horse Estate of the Maharaja—”

Kutmar cut him off with a wave of the hand, as if that’s what he expected of such a profligate. “Yes, we know who he is. A harmless playboy who likes women and horses. Preferably together.”

Yasmine leaned over the desk again in a strange eager way. “How would you describe your relation to Jan Breuer?”

“I was his pass-along. His front man. I put the signatures on the checks or drafts to be deposited. I was the face at the teller’s cage. My prints on the pen. Nothing more. The balance floated at about that $250,000 figure. Though the bank statements came to me, they may have gone to a dozen others as well. I suppose I could have taken a cut every time, but I didn’t. Originally I used some of it to pay my daughter’s college bills. But as the years passed, I decided it was probably best if I never touched the money again.”

Johnson paused; his mouth dry, his eyes grainy. Even sitting in the chair his heart throbbed in his ears without making a sound, but he felt himself recovering his equilibrium with them.

“You might not recognize Jan Breuer if you met him again.” This from Kutmar.

“I’d recognize him,” Johnson grumbled. “He’s a large, florid Dutchman with bright blond hair and drinker’s veins in his face.” Johnson paused, looked lovingly at the coffee and the pack of cigarettes on the table. “Men like Jan Breuer, Dutch Shell oil executive, and people like me, Western journalist, appreciate your problem.”

“You do?” the Sheik asked. “Please explain.”

“Your
Sukuk
and
Zakat
look too much alike.” Johnson let the strange words hang. He was insulting their banking system.
Sukuk
were lowinterest-bearing bonds and
Zakat
, alms for the poor.

Suddenly the DVD recorder’s red light died. Without the DVD, they were off the record. Yasmine removed the disc. This day’s interrogation would never exist. For the first time Yasmine reevaluated her measure of the man. “You wish to expound on the principles of Islamic banking?”

“Not without coffee and a cigarette.”

Johnson got his coffee; he got his cigarette.

“What principles? You possess no modern banking,” Johnson said flatly, daring them to challenge the fact. “Mohammed condemns usury. Allowing only ‘Gold for Gold, Silver for Silver, Wheat for Wheat’ . . . ” Here Johnson sipped his coffee, lit a cigarette, and a look of scorn came across his face. Muslim Mickey Mouse Banks offered
Sukuk
, worthless
bonds that looked a lot like
Zakat
, alms for the poor. In other words,
thrown
away. The point not lost on his gracious hosts.

“The mullahs do handsprings over medieval fatwas so you can offer lousy 3 percent bonds. A return on investment far below what’s commonly available to the average American housewife.” Yasmine sat back in her chair, wary now at the man’s knowledge, an unexpected quality. Kutmar’s face was stone. Johnson twisted the knife.

“What any modern
woman
can do, you cannot. Instead, they cut off your head.”

Johnson came back to his coffee and his cigarette again. It amazed him how those two simple delicacies made the throbbing in his cut and crusted feet somehow shrink to a manageable proportion. Johnson chuckled, the first smile since he’d come to this awful place.

“Sheik, you’re not worried about losing your head as much as losing your country’s money. Jan Breuer and I deposited a few million, but you’re looking at
billions
. You can buy a lot of Jihad for that, now can’t you?” And here Johnson’s face twisted from scorn to a sneer. “That’s a ton of
self-discovery
, a heap of
personal struggle
.”

Sheik Kutmar’s face remained behind the veil of his mind. “I didn’t know you were such an expert,” the Sheik finally said.

The cigarette and the coffee were gone. Johnson shrugged. “I try to keep up.”

Johnson awoke on the damp, lumpy mattress to the throbbing from the soles of his feet. For some reason the goons hadn’t beaten him before putting him to bed that night. And now, this morning something crucial had changed. The door to his windowless room was cracked open, a sliver of light falling across his face, the hallway beyond dead silent. Coming somewhere beyond the door ajar the sound of traffic floated through the open crack. What the hell was going on? An open door? Were they letting him go?

Johnson rose and tried to stand—an act that took a little more than mere balance. Both feet had swollen from the beatings, crusted with
scabs. His bloody torn socks lay in a filthy corner of the room, his shoes beside them. The socks useless, and the shoes? There’s no way they’d fit. Holding on to the walls he edged toward them, then stooped for the shoes. Tying the laces together he threw them over his shoulder and made his way to the door. He suddenly remembered that silly woman at Josephine’s cocktail party, a million years ago, it seemed—the one with the wooden boxes for footwear—where the hell was she when he needed her now? He could use her shoes.

A dirty, flyspecked hallway greeted him, layered with peeling paint and powdering plaster. Still holding onto the wall for support he shuffled to the sound of the traffic. That door was open too, the sound of traffic stronger. He recognized the interrogation room at once by the sickly color of the walls. He pushed open the door and staggered inside. No Sheik, no Yasmine, no goons. Just the empty table. They’d even taken the lamp with them.

Against one wall stood a large, old-fashioned tape recorder with sixteen-inch spools, something out of the 1970s that could play ten hours of tape at a time or record as much. By the way they placed Johnson’s chair and yanked off his hood there’d be no way he could have seen the bulky device without twisting his head off his shoulders. Besides, most of the time he was simply too beaten down to care much about his surroundings. The tape recorder was still playing its endless tape. The sounds of street traffic, cars, and muffled honks dribbled from the little speakers. For a long moment he marveled at these cheap theatrics, driving home the dagger that whatever lay beyond these dirty walls was nothing like he imagined. Even as he watched, the endless spool ran out, the sound of recorded traffic ending abruptly and the tail end of the tape going
flap-flap-flap
. . .

Johnson managed to find his way downstairs, wedging himself through a heavy front door that stuck, emerging at last not onto a busy thoroughfare but some sort of warren, a Kasbah with shuttered windows high up on whitewashed walls, no sound of people in an unknown city as the noon sun blazed down. And each way he looked the same view presented itself, like a white stucco maze, doors and high windows; the
windows shuttered and all the doors made of the same heavy wood with paint flaking off.

Over the warren’s rooftops he spied a more modern building, a kind of apartment complex. There, try there. So, in his bare feet with shoes thrown over his shoulder, in dirty shirt and pants, Johnson picked that direction, west, and started to stagger.

At the first intersection of the Kasbah he paused to get his breath. Beyond, he saw the colorful and noisy corner of a marketplace, a bazaar. A beggar sat at his feet. A man in loincloth and twisted feet, curled into a strange hooked shape next to a wooden bowl and prayer mat. The wizened and toothless old man grinned at him, offering the bowl for alms. But beside the cripple stood his crutches, leaning against the plaster wall.

Johnson saw a spark in the old man’s eye as he glanced at his swollen bloody feet. Then a flash of lust as he dwelled on the expensive shoes dangling from the white man’s neck. For a moment Johnson was tempted to barter his wingtips for the crutches, but immediately abandoned the fantasy. Better just keep moving. Find a way out.

As he stumbled into the colorful bazaar, the noise and throngs assailed him. Each way he looked, another row of stalls, merchants hawking, dozens of narrow colorful pathways, leading everywhere and nowhere.

J
ohnson’s heart sank, his eyes flashing from one useless direction to the next. Each lane led off blindly; bright awnings in every direction covered mountains of goods, spilling over trestle tables. Crowds of shoppers milled in the narrow confines of the bazaar. Women covered head-to-toe in red and blue and yellow cloth followed their men, who haggled with the shopkeepers, leaving the women to fetch and tote. The throbbing in his feet welled up to overwhelm him.
Damn
, he thought,
shoulda just swiped the cripple’s frigging crutches
. He glanced back down the whitewashed alley. The beggar was gone.

He tried to form a plan. First, find out what city he was in. Second, find a consulate, maybe Swiss or British. Throw himself through the gate. Who knows? Al Jazeera might even have an office somewhere. Looking past the overlapping awnings, he kept moving toward the hard modern edge of concrete buildings.
That
way. But first his feet—the wingtips were worthless. He found a few thousand crumpled Rials in his pants pocket. As he staggered toward the silhouettes of the modern buildings, he stopped at the first stall he saw to buy a pair of cheap rubber sandals. A few hundred Rials bought him some CrocsRX knockoffs, a size too large. Bright blue. And two pairs of white cotton socks.

In four minutes, the $1,000 Brooks Brothers wingtips sat in the shoe seller’s stall, and Johnson was hobbling along on more comfy feet,
bleeding into his socks. He could see the concrete buildings quite clearly now at the far end of the bazaar: apartment complexes. Normal streets, cars, and traffic. Sure, find a taxi, and say “Al Jazeera” over and over again. That might work.

But Johnson suddenly noticed shooflies, dogging his steps, seeming to appear from nowhere out of the crowd. The first one with his back turned, choosing olives from a stall of barrels—at a word from the olive merchant he turned, forgetting his purchase, glanced at Johnson, and then followed quietly in his footsteps.

Another squatted on a low stool by a colorful rack of scarves. Abandoning his post, he stood and joined the Olive Man, walking as a pair. Johnson slid into the most tangled parts of the crowd, hunching behind a stall hoping to be overlooked. Then scurried on again into another noisy swirl of buyers and sellers.

Yet even as he ducked awkwardly behind a large butcher’s counter—hidden for the moment behind a rack of lamb carcasses on meat hooks and thinking he’d given them the slip—another man joined the hunt. Then another turned, a barber cutting hair by his barber chair, handing off comb and scissors to his assistant to finish off the job. And another who loafed against a wall simply threw down his cigarette and fell neatly in step.

Johnson counted five, slowly trailing him, not letting him get too far ahead, but not coming within clutch distance either, a game of cat and mouse. Or were they driving him? He couldn’t tell.

And what was worse: now he recognized two of the men, the brutes from his windowless room. The goons who beat him. A terrible sweat broke out all over his body. He wanted to run, but where? And how, given the state of his feet?

It occurred to him that the Iranians hadn’t let him go idly. Now officially
escaped
. Could he deny it—as Yasmine might have asked? For the first time since he picked the gun off the dashboard, he felt sure that right now he was going to die.

He resisted the urge to sink into the dust, cowering. A rush of fear they’d drag him back to the beating room. Finish him off for good this time. Instead, he stumbled his way toward the edge of the marketplace.
He saw a crowded open plaza with kiosks selling ice cream and falafel, then the flow of busy traffic along a broad boulevard, while a line of white Yugo taxis idled by the curb. He paused at the edge of the bazaar at the nearest kiosk selling bottled water and meat kabobs. He was dying of thirst, but the smell of the burnt lamb nauseated him. Paralyzed, he stood there, frozen in place.

A knot of military policemen had gathered along the edge of the plaza, not loitering but tensely waiting, as if uncertain what they were really looking for. Could he make it to a taxi without being pinched? What was the Farsi word for “drive”? The colorful crowds flowed around him, while the goons lurked in the shadows of the awnings, not twenty feet away. In some animal way, he knew if he moved so much as a muscle they’d pounce.

Two women in full chador rudely jostled him. Niqabs covered them from head to toe with only a slit to see. Dutifully he shuffled aside. The stockier one touched his wrist. Something about the eyes, but it was the soft voice that spoke English, which made his heart leap.