John F. Kennedy International Airport

John F. Kennedy International Airport becomes the meeting place for a major drug purchase and a test of Harry Goldfarb’s belief that careful planning can make him invisible. Carrying $75,000 in a locked briefcase, he moves through the airport as if he were an ordinary businessman; the public setting that he treats as camouflage also leaves him exposed to chance and delay.

The Airport as a Meeting Place

Harry drives to the airport with the briefcase beside him, keeping the car windows closed and the music low. He has chosen a Chevrolet rather than a Mercedes and arranged for himself and Tyrone C. Love to make contacts with different groups, reasoning that blending into ordinary traffic will keep their operation unnoticed. At the airport, he has time to spare. He eats coffee and pie in the coffee shop with the case on his lap, then settles at the far end of the cocktail lounge, near windows overlooking the airfield.

The room’s ordinary activity supplies the meeting with a plausible surface. Harry watches planes take off, land, and taxi toward the ramps while a man dressed in a similar coat and hat takes the stool beside him. The stranger has a matching attaché case and places it near his own foot. After finishing his drink, the man picks up Harry’s case and leaves. Harry continues watching the planes; ten minutes later, he takes the case left beside him and walks out without checking for the stranger. The passage presents the exchange through Harry’s untroubled assumption that everything is proceeding as planned.

Concealment and Self-Confidence

For Harry, the airport’s size and busyness are part of the cover. A mid-afternoon meeting in a place so public, with so many police and so many possible escape routes blocked, seems an unlikely setting for a drug deal. He regards that apparent unsuitability as precisely what makes the arrangement effective. The contrast between the conspicuous sum in the case and his unremarkable appearance sustains his fantasy that nearby travelers would mistake him for a stockbroker or investment counselor.

That fantasy turns the airport into a stage for an imagined identity. As Harry crosses the bridge, sunlight on its cables becomes, in his mind, a field of spotlights with himself as the star. Yet the performance depends on nobody paying much attention: he takes pride in being so unobtrusive that he seems to disappear into traffic. His confidence is not proof that the plan is secure; it is the story he tells himself while carrying the money and trusting his instincts.

Traffic and the Limits of Control

Harry leaves the terminal believing he has collected the final pound of heroin before he and Tyrone close their operation. The return journey is slowed by unusually heavy traffic, flat tires, collisions, and flashing red and yellow lights. He initially dismisses the lights as unrelated tow trucks or ambulances and stays calm, consistent with his conviction that their meeting has been designed to defeat suspicion. But the congestion becomes a danger in its own right: a stalled journey could leave him exposed with the case in the open.

The airport episode sets Harry’s meticulous precautions against the forces they cannot manage. He plans his departure time, chooses an ordinary car, and relies on a public meeting place precisely because it seems too exposed to attract suspicion; then the traffic surrounding that plan refuses to move on schedule. His calm departure from the lounge and the growing disorder on the road form a quiet reversal: the man who imagines himself directing an invisible operation is still at the mercy of chance, and the apparent success of the pickup does not make his confidence reliable.