Banquo's Ghosts (4 page)

On top of all that, a table full of grumpy Russians spilling caviar onto their ties and trying to explain why Soviet-designed planes kept falling out of the skies—priceless.

Johnson finished and headed upstairs. When he opened his suite door and flipped on the light, the first thing he saw was the set-up on the table. A large silver bucket of ice, a bowl of limes, a wooden cutting block, a knife, a bottle of Schweppes Tonic, and a blessed liter of Tanqueray. The green bottle smiled at him like a long lost friend. He reached out to touch it, savoring its sexy emerald curves. The little white note said, “Compliments of Al Jazeera.” Compliments indeed,
Praise Allah.
He was saved.

And then from around the world Banquo’s schoolmaster’s voice warned,
Go easy, Peter
. . . It took a full moment to get the insistent voice out of his head and back to its proper place in the old man’s spartan Rockefeller Center office.

The room smelled of must and rosewater but soon filled with the aroma of gin and tonics. He stood at the window overlooking the city, idly sucked the lime juice from a rind, and stared across the hot expanse of air dotted with those Scheherazade fairy lights, but this time with the traffic moving. Miles and miles of snaking cars, white lights coming and red lights, blinking brighter on and off, going the other way. The muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer.
Someone somewhere was always praying in this country.
He took a long draught that went down without complaint, stringent and quenching. Looking across the city at night, he felt as if he were standing on a great precipice, the immensity in front of him prompting the sort of contemplative reverie you get on a mountaintop or looking out over the ocean.

Knowing that for better or ill he was stepping off into some irrevocable chain of events from which there was no way back. He thought of God,
or the idea of God, and suddenly wished that for
once
in his life he believed. How he might have given the gift of faith to his daughter. Even faked it for Giselle’s sake. Let her grow up and decide for herself, whether to believe or not. Instead of breaking the notion of God like every other childhood fantasy—leprechauns, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy—
no, Giselle, there is no Santa Claus.
The thousand little ways adults wring the magic out of a child’s life.

He looked down at the ice cubes, marooned, and stacked one on another at the bottom of his empty glass. Chances were excellent he was going to drink too much.

No, not tonight.
One more, a stiff one, but not four more. Empty out most of the bottle just for show. With the taste of grit in his mouth and a touch of sadness, the better part of the liter vanished down the toilet and into the Euphrates River as Crocodile Cocktails. Cheers.

An hour of pacing, of looking at his sad reflection, jowls and drinker’s veins, in the glass window, of wishing he could find a woman here to share his loneliness with, if just for one night, of finally imagining the incredible piece he’d really write if ever given the chance, about what was
really
going on now. All the ice had melted, the second glass long finished, and the bed found him.

As he lay there with the lights dimmed, love handles spilling over his boxers, something nagged him. Nagged him like the embarrassing regrets that usually splintered through his drunken hazes back home, over a rude pass at a woman too young for him, or a cruel remark to some slovenly sot as liquored up as himself in a forgotten dinner table debate. Something the clever Sheik had said, something knocking at the back door of his brain.

It wasn’t the fact that the imperious snob had actually said it—the sentiment was common enough out here—but because Johnson had heard it before, in other terms. Something much like it . . . long ago at a fancy New York dinner party. Dinner hosted by Jo von H. Years had passed between that party and tonight’s meeting, as he methodically
drank so many of his old memories out of his mind. But that night stood out. As clear and cool a September evening as you could ask for, the lights going on in all the apartment buildings, the traffic moving elegantly along the trees of Central Park, and Tavern on the Green bejeweled in white lights against the growing darkness of the park.

Josephine Parker von Hildebrand’s apartment overlooked Central Park West, Number 151, The Kenilworth, a French Second Empire- style building with a magisterial entrance flanked by banded columns. Past the liveried doorman, he met Neville Poore, former theater critic at the
Times
, in the marble lobby, and they took the elevator together. Poore had recently strayed from the Great White Way, haughtily gliding onto the national scene.

Lately, he had written three straight columns about a Republican embroiled in a sex scandal after getting caught having affairs with both young men and women staffers in his congressional office. “I’m a bi American,” the politician declared at an August press conference, at the end of which a cameraman accidentally knocked him over in the media crush. Neville Poore excoriated the country for its supposed fixation with the flap, even though he had written about nothing else since it happened and read the broadest possible meanings into it, like in today’s number: “Democrats were quick to maneuver for advantage in the scandal, making it truly an exercise in
bi
partisanship. But the real story is Red State America’s repressed obsession with sex that lashes out at any departure from an Ozzie and Harriet dream world at the same time it forces the desires of its own representatives into the shattering contortions entailed by the closet. Perhaps the nation will finally wake up: polymorphous perversity now, polymorphous perversity forever—for the sake of our emotional, political, and spiritual health, if nothing else.”

And so it went. Neville lived the editorialist’s dream, gassing on in blissful ignorance, seemingly unable to learn from the spectacularly extensive corrections buried near the front of the paper days after his columns ran.

“CORRECTION: Spiro Agnew was governor of Maryland, not Mississippi, prior to becoming the vice president of the United States.
He resigned in a scandal related to bribes taken as governor, not over the outrage after the bombing of Cambodia. He was Greek, not Italian.”

Details, details.

“Nice bi-line today,” Johnson said, relishing his pun, though Neville couldn’t see it. He and the columnist still locked eyes, anticipating something fun and the taste of that first drink. Jo’s parties always had that effect. As the elevator man opened the gated door, Johnson waved the exalted Nevillian out ahead of him, smiling, “It’s just a simple supper party, but let’s not keep the little woman waiting. She’s been slaving all day.”

Poore laughed. “If I had your ex-wives, I wouldn’t have to work.”

Johnson caught a glimpse of himself in the gilt-edged hallway mirror: the dapper drake with a receding hairline, in standard pinstripe blue and open collar, smiled gravely back. They heard the sounds of the party, the staccato clinking of glasses like a monstrous wind chime, then the sonorous murmuring of a gossipy theater crowd during an intermission at a Broadway opening. A long, tall, and narrow hall like the entranceway to a cathedral marched off ahead. The walls lined with paintings: a Caravaggio, a Dürer woodblock print—both darkly lush and worth more than $10 million; framed covers of
Crusader
issues; and black-and-white news file photos of Jo von H in various Edward R. Murrow poses. There’d been a lot of water under the bridge since those Oxford days, the briefest of marriages, a short detour on Josephine’s march to glory. Vanity, thy name is suffragette. And to make it all perfect, one portrait, an oil painting, lit from above: the late Mr. Josephine Parker von Hildebrand.
Her
second Ex.

Also known on the oilfields of Texas as Big Joe Hill. No relation whatsoever to the Wobbly legend of Woody Guthrie fame. Josephine’s great conquest and now dead ex-husband. A trim black bit of crepe crossed the corner of the portrait. The likeness showed the hard, unrelenting face of an oilman, emphasis on the man, many years older than his pretty wife.

Sure, she divorced him. Who wouldn’t? Sure, she took him for everything—what was wrong with that? But it was pure Josephine to honor the old wildcatter’s memory with a serious, sympathetic, and
heroic likeness. She took his money, despised his Texas ways, and fled to more sophisticated climes, but damned if she didn’t make him the poster boy of that long elegant hallway and every luxury that followed. After all, in every sense of the word, he was the founder of the feast.

Still, you couldn’t feel too sorry for the old geezer. After Josephine put the touch on him, others lined up for the same treatment. She wasn’t beautiful, but people thought she was. Tall, in as good shape as a fifty-year-old could be, with platinum blonde-dyed hair and the best breasts money could buy; Johnson had nicknamed her lesser charms from those Oxford days “our little secrets.”

Her wardrobe took up closets that four or five families from Queens would be happy to live in. No one noticed her plain features. The force of her personality overwhelmed all else. Witty, shrewd, magnetic, and kind when she wanted to be, Josephine had practically every desirable personal characteristic, except wisdom and mercy. She was always dating very wealthy men fifteen years younger than herself, who adored her and eagerly did her bidding. She called them her “Lancelots.”

The von Hildebrand hallway opened up into a grand oval foyer with rooms radiating from its center and a staircase rising to fainting heights. Every catered affair had its tone, some informal, some black-tie, but Josephine preferred the starched white blouse and gray apron types, a uniform commonly seen in the 1950s on pale Irish maidservants and reserved Spanish butlers fresh from Cuba.

Large silver platters of hors d’oeuvres circulated among the privileged, and Johnson never doubted his place among them: the hors d’oeuvres and the exalted both. In those days, he knew what he was supposed to think and duly thought it, although not without a dollop of ironic detachment. Whether he was chatting up the famous director of the Zyklon-B movie trilogy or whether he stopped and admired the footwear of a frail but winsomely vulnerable young woman wearing finely crafted wooden boxes on her feet instead of pumps to accessorize her little black cocktail dress. Yes, he knew how to ooze approval.

The boxes were about the size of women’s cardboard shoeboxes, but fitted together with finely carpentered slats, plain and unvarnished. Her ankles emerged from their little sarcophagi through circular holes that rubbed her skin raw as she wore them. Like Hindu or Christian ascetics mortifying their flesh with metal collars or shackles. But what was she punishing herself for? A mystery.

The wooden boxes on the frail woman’s feet turned out to have something to do with urban poverty or the rain forest, but as Johnson was on his third Knob Creek, the difference between the two causes had become immaterial to him. He just knew to nod at whatever she said and be sure to get her number. Rain forests or poor yobbos, it was all the same to him.

Then something even more curious happened. He overheard two men holding forth to a half circle of admirers. The word “Jews” said with a particular twist, veiled condescension. He knew the men, and he listened as each academic trumpeted his pedigree. One from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, a Belfer Professor of International Affairs. The other academic was from the Institute for Policy Studies, a Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago.

Professors Deerwood and Lenzheimer had recently worked together on a foreign policy white paper of some note, the thrust being that U.S. foreign policy was twisted on the fingers of . . . well,
you know
. What struck Johnson was the use of the phrase “the Jewish question”—those exact words, with an academic’s sneer, bringing him up short.

Knowing he was too tight to join the magic circle of admirers he listened from afar until Professor Deerwood said, “Look at the numbers, 1.5 billion Muslims, 5 million Jews in the Holy Land—yet we dance along to their every whim.”

Johnson felt a surge of anger crawl up into his throat. Yes, he could admit, he was a little dishonest, a little greedy, and even a little corrupt. Add to that a lush, a womanizer, and three times divorced. You could even throw in manipulative and selfish for good measure.

But he could honestly hate a thing as well as any saint or sinner. And the thing he reviled more than any other thing—honest to God—were Jew-haters. Jew-haters in every form and guise, from the toothless rube
to the well-heeled WASP. But of all the Jew-haters he despised—more than any neo-Nazi skinhead—were the pointy-headed intellectuals, the sophisticated, sleight-of-hand Jew-haters, the let’s-adopt-the-Saudi-peace-plan, and gosh-aren’t-these-people-awfully-pushy-and-greedy-for-such-a-little-country? Jew-haters. The covert Jew-haters, covering their slimy tracks with position papers for think tanks and “peace” conferences in Belgium. “Look at the numbers, 1.5 billion Muslims, 5 million Jews.” Yeah. That said it all.
Never again?

Johnson decided to join the circle, spouting a bit of poetry at them, knowing the chances of making an ass out of himself ranged from quite high to near certain. He felt a good stab of regret coming on for later, but what he had to say came out coherently enough:

“As the journalist and good Commie William Norman Ewer said back in the 19
^th
century,

He got a few nervous smiles. No one was quite sure where he was going with this. They didn’t know the reference to Ewer-The-Obscure. At least Johnson had broken their moment. And so out of sheer spite he kicked the shards across the room: