Killer, Come Hither

by Louis Begley

  This is so beautiful, Kerry, I said, and you are beautiful. Breathtakingly so.

  I want to be, she answered smiling. I want you to like me. And I want to give you a drink.

  It turned out that we both wanted a vodka. She kept it in the freezer and showed me the bottle. Luksusowa, she said, Polish potato vodka, remarkably good and remarkably inexpensive. A boyfriend I had when I was at the U.S. Attorney’s Office put me on to it and even taught me how to pronounce the name. It’s the best thing he ever did for me.

  The past tense saves the situation, I told her. Have you got a boyfriend now, vodka drinking or other?

  She shook her head.

  Good, I said, because I want to apply for the position.

  The words left my mouth as though they had a will of their own, and I realized that this was not mere banter. Although I hardly knew her, there was something about this girl’s nearness—we were sitting on the sofa—that was making my heart pound and filling me with something like joy. A kind of joy that I would not have thought possible with the circumstances of Harry’s death as the great subject we would inevitably have to deal with. Except that it was not unlike the joy, triumphant joy, I had felt after the first night during the Phantom Fury in Fallujah, when I realized that no one in my platoon had been hit, or again when the morphine kicked in at Delaram and medics strapped me onto the stretcher for loading on the helicopter, and I realized I was going to live. Where had I been, what had I been thinking of? Why hadn’t our few previous contacts been sufficient? Could it be that her being Harry’s favorite associate and protégée, perhaps his dream daughter, had prevented me from responding to her as a woman?

  As it happens, she told me, the position is open, and a priori you seem qualified. Of course, the matter will have to be investigated.

  And there aren’t any temps hanging around?

  Jesus, she said, you want the terrain all to yourself!

  Of course, I said. It’s basic infantry tactics: occupy the terrain and secure the perimeter.

  You can relax, Captain, she answered, it’s a tenure-track position. Applications from temps and adjuncts are discouraged. No, she added seeing me move toward her, don’t advance too quickly. Let’s drink our vodka and eat the canapés I’ve prepared. You shouldn’t drink vodka without food.

  She’d kicked off her slippers and walked to the kitchen barefoot. I took that as an incontrovertible sign of trust. She wasn’t going to hide her feet from me. It was a very quick trip. She put on the coffee table a green rectangular dish on which she’d arranged little squares of pâté de campagne, each with its own toothpick. They were surrounded by black olives.

  For the second time in such a short while I was deeply moved. This was the way my beautiful mother had served hors d’oeuvres, with the same simplicity and care. Why hadn’t Harry mentioned her domestic talents? Perhaps he had never had occasion to discover them.

  I told her I loved her pâté and olives and managed to restrain myself from saying that I thought I loved her too—or even that I was falling in love.

  Good, she said, now we have to talk about Harry. I’m a night person, so if you’ve gotten some rest before coming over, we aren’t pressed for time.

  She shifted her position on the sofa and stretched out her legs, so that her naked feet were inches from my left hand.

  A knot had formed in my throat, but I nodded and told her, on the whole coherently, the gist of my conversations with Minot, Hobson, and, finally, Jeanette.

  She let out a groan. That’s just about what I expected. No, it’s even more slimy than what I thought those guys were capable of. There was nothing wrong with Harry’s mind. I would have been the first to notice. It’s a poisonous invention of Hobson’s and I don’t know who else. He told you they were keeping the dementia a secret. That’s the party line and a total fabrication. In fact, they leaked it all over the firm. Not to me, because Hobson knows I’d have laughed in his face or perhaps slugged him, but widely enough for several partners to have come to ask me about it. You know: how bad was it, when did I first notice it, what did I do to make sure that we didn’t make mistakes and so on.

  And what did you say?

  I said that so far as I was concerned there was absolutely nothing wrong with Harry’s mind or emotional equilibrium—yes, that was a part of the story, that the clouding of his mind had affected his emotional balance.

  And these were all one-on-one conversations? That’s all? You didn’t speak up? You didn’t tell Harry about it? Challenge Hobson? Send around a memo to partners?

  I didn’t want to embarrass Harry. He was still coming to the office. Practically every day. And then, she suddenly wailed: Jack, there is something you don’t know about me that I have to tell you. I was a coward. I hope you will understand the reasons and that they won’t make you withdraw your application. It would make me horribly sad if you did.

  Nothing you can tell me will have that effect, I said, and, ready to withdraw at the slightest sign that I had given offense, extended my hand and began caressing those poor shy feet.

  The feet were not withdrawn. Instead, they began to rub against my hand in a gesture that made me think of Plato rubbing his back against my leg when he was pleased or wanted to remind me that there was something he’d demanded and I had foolishly forgotten to take care of.

  Promise? she asked.

  I nodded.

  Here is the truth then, she said, the awful disabling truth. Jack, I haven’t been able to be brave in Harry’s defense, and I can’t be very brave now. I have to be extremely careful in my dealings with those pricks because I am so vulnerable. Not even Harry knew about it. But you will. I’m an only child. My parents were in their late thirties when they had me. They were both high school teachers, in Montclair, New Jersey, where we lived. They’re both still alive, my mother in a retirement community, my father in a nursing home with a special facility for demented patients. You see, I know about dementia. He has Alzheimer’s, has had it for more than ten years. It was slow moving at first. My mother tried to have him at home far longer than was good for her or, indirectly, for me, but about six years ago he got too difficult for her to control, even with the help of a nurse. He made her life hell. So she finally agreed to institutionalize him. The facility is very good and as you would expect very expensive. It’s near Montclair. My mother drives there to see him practically every day. That too is hell. Of course the little money they inherited from my paternal grandparents and their savings have been spent. I paid for my mother to get into the retirement community and I give her the extra money she needs for upkeep of the car, clothes, hairdresser, and occasional trips to Princeton or New York that the retirement home organizes. And the presents she likes to give, including presents for me! And I pay for the nursing home. It hasn’t been easy, coming on top of what I owed for student loans. By the way, that’s why I didn’t stay at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I loved the moral clarity of the work I did as a prosecutor—there was never any question about whether I was on the right side when I was putting bad guys behind bars—but I needed the big law-firm salary. And now I can’t afford, I can’t risk, being pushed out of the firm. It’s shameful, but there it is. I can’t put my parents in jeopardy so I have to pussyfoot around those guys. I can’t be as brave as I’d like. Besides, I like to live nicely. I don’t hide it.

  She motioned vaguely to show that she meant her apartment. I nodded, and she added quickly, Don’t get me wrong, this apartment is anything but expensive. It’s rent controlled. You wouldn’t believe it, but the building belongs to the Rubinstein brothers. They’re a big real estate family in New York, and they’ve never tried to turn it into condominiums or co-op apartments. Instead they rent to family friends and retainers. I qualified because I roomed with a Rubinstein daughter the whole time we were together at Dartmouth.

  Kerry, I said, you’re incredibly brave. Telling me took real courage. It’s true that we have a lot of disagreeable stuff to talk about, but I am a n
ight person too, so we have lots of time. Do you think you could interview me for my new job before we talk about Harry? Don’t keep me on tenterhooks! I need to know I’ve been hired.

  I had not been with a woman, not since the English girl who reminded me of Felicity, and I wanted Kerry desperately. Nonetheless, after I had helped her out of the silk sheath and her modest good-girl panties and bra, and had torn off my own clothes, and we had finally lain down on her surprisingly large bed, I found that instead of needing to take her at once I preferred to touch and explore every square inch and crevice of her muscular and supple body and to breathe in its aroma, a witch’s brew of soap, toothpaste, and scents compounded of fresh sweat and intoxicating secretions. She wore no perfume. When, at my urging, she raised her knees, I put my face where I could taste her best. Her moans turned into rhythmic shrieks. Sometime later—but how much later was it?—she pushed me away, and whispered, Jack, don’t make me wait any longer, come inside, I want you inside.

  I’m unequipped, I too whispered. I hadn’t thought…

  So am I, she whispered back, but it’s all right. I’ve just had my period. Come, my love, come.

  She’d actually said it!

  We made love twice more and fell into a deep sleep. When I awoke, finding her arm wrapped around my torso, I thought it was morning, but the radio clock told me we hadn’t slept more than three-quarters of an hour. We took a shower together. Laughing like a madwoman, Kerry produced from a closet a long yellow peignoir she’d brought home from a Puerto Rican vacation and said she wanted me to wear it to dinner, instead of my clothes, which were so much more difficult to get out of. She’d wear the black one. This was easy, but there was nothing she could ask to which I wouldn’t have agreed.

  —

  The job is yours, she said, when we sat down to dinner. The requirements are simple: unless I give you the night off, you are required to make me feel just the way you made me feel just now every night of the week. For your information, tomorrow I’m going on the pill, so there’ll be no excuses.

  The meal consisted of a white gazpacho followed by a shrimp quiche she heated up in the microwave oven and cheese and grapes for dessert. She opened a bottle of Sancerre. We were ravenous, and it wasn’t until the cheese and grapes were on the table that I finally brought myself to ask the questions that the “job interview” had put in abeyance. What were the pressures on Harry, I asked, that she had mentioned more than once, and what did she think were the reasons that had led Hobson to force him to retire and invent and spread the lie about his dementia.

  There was a long pause.

  Look, she said, it all related to Abner Brown and his businesses. Harry had gotten so thoroughly involved in the Brown legal problems, you could say without exaggeration that he alone apart from Abner knew and understood them all, and he’d gotten just as involved with Abner personally. Abner would call him—I don’t know—four or five or more times a day. About everything. The troubles with his wife, Linda, the troubles with the constantly changing cast of girlfriends and their demands for money. Money to get them to sleep with him, to get them to go on sleeping with him, to get them to promise not to tell Linda after he’d stopped screwing them. How was he to make these gifts, which ran into many millions a pop, disappear so that Linda wouldn’t see them when she signed their joint gift tax return, how to make sure that the bimbo who’d been paid so she wouldn’t tell would indeed keep her mouth shut? You know Harry just as well as I, or perhaps better, so I don’t need to tell you that this stuff made him sick, but there was no way he could refuse to get involved because it had become a matter of friendship. This is how Abner would put it: You’re my best friend, you’re my only friend, nobody else can help me out. There were also problems with the boys, the two sons. One of them was caught bugging the headmaster’s bedroom at his boarding school. Abner calls Harry: Your grandfather founded that fucking dump! Can you call the fuckhead rector and get him to call off the dogs? You’ve carte blanche on negotiating the donation. Or, Harry, would you check out triplex X in the new Gehry building, and what do you think of César Pelli’s project downtown? There’s a penthouse there I might like. Then he’d call in the middle of the night to ask, Have you been to see it yet? Obviously some of it was heady, flattering stuff, and occasionally very interesting. At the same time, Harry observed all the faults, the real baseness and duplicity, of Abner’s character and would say to himself, Why did I get sucked into this bog, why didn’t I draw the line at representing him and his companies in specific discrete deals? There was no satisfactory answer because the truth was that he did feel flattered and did fall for the lure of the mass of profitable work he’d be bringing to the firm. But then came his increasingly apocalyptic view of the role Abner is playing in the political life of the country through his PACs and his think tanks.

  I interrupted saying that I thought he and Abner had agreed right at the outset to keep politics out of their relationship.

  He told me the same thing, but that was before Abner burst onto the national scene. At the time, he was only mucking around in Texas and Arizona and spreading his brand of poison through the media. But Harry thought that what he was doing to defeat Obama in the upcoming election was in an altogether-different register. He’s subverting the Republic, is what he told me.

  Thinking of how the guys in my battalion, officers and NCOs included, had been eating up the shit dished out over the Internet and in talk shows by Abner’s Freedom Now Foundation and the talking fuckheads financed by it, I nodded and said, I agree with Harry.

  And with me, she replied. Look, Jack, she continued, now we’re getting to the pressures that came from Abner’s businesses, and here I’m doubly constrained. I’ve told you, not because I want pity or sympathy, about being vulnerable, which has been for me constraint number one in dealing with what has happened.

  Again I interrupted. Kerry, I said, that vulnerability is over. I’ll stand with you, at your side, behind you, anywhere you need cover. In practical terms that means that if you need money I’ll share my money with you. That’s what Harry would have done if you’d only let him, that’s what he would have wanted me to do, and that’s what I’m determined to do.

  She flew to my side of the table, sat down in my lap, and kissed me on my lips. As the kiss deepened I felt an urgent need to get her back on the bed. Talk could wait. My hand under her peignoir, I caressed her breasts until the nipples were hard and she began to grind against me.

  Stop, please stop, she said, and moved to the armchair placed catercorner to the sofa. You sit down on the sofa and let me finish what I have to tell you. Before I do, though, I want to thank you. What you’ve just said is very beautiful and very generous, but I’m a big girl—she giggled—and I have to stand on my own big feet.

  The second constraint, she continued, comes from my duties as a lawyer. Canons of professional responsibility. Abner and his businesses were my clients; they are still my clients for those purposes, even though I’ve been removed from doing any work for them. I can’t divulge their secrets, I can’t breach their confidences. I’ve already come pretty close to that when I talked about Abner’s personal issues and Harry’s involvement in them. This is the constraint that almost drove Harry nuts. So I’m going to talk in generalities. Even that’s something I probably have no right to do, but here goes. I believe—but bear in mind that Harry never disclosed to me the facts of his discoveries—that at some point, less than a year ago, when Abner began exploring listing his holding company on the stock exchange, not the very top holding company that owns literally everything in Abner’s empire but the one directly under it that owns the moneymaking businesses, Harry started looking hard at the structure and what was inside what he called the black box. And I believe that what he saw curdled his blood. I’m not talking only about such things as tax evasion, though I’m sure there was plenty of that, or price-fixing here and there or suppressed or concealed field-test reports indicating that the medical products sold by
some of the Brown companies are dangerous or some serious pollution and failure to report. No, I believe that he discovered a pattern of completely pervasive wholesale violations of law, U.S. law, state law, and laws of the foreign countries where Brown companies operate. That is what I think he saw, and the question is what was he going to do about it. And for God’s sake, Jack, remember that he never told me what he saw or how he got at it. I’m telling you what I believe happened. He had a problem he couldn’t solve.

  You know, some obvious solutions occur to me, I answered. One, he could have gone to the police, the FBI, or whoever else you go to in such a case. Two, he could have stopped working for Brown and his companies. And stop dealing with Abner’s personal life! What could have gotten into Harry?

  You’re right. He could have pulled out. That is the decision that I think he finally reached, on some such basis as that Abner and his businesses were engaged in a continuing fraud and course of criminal conduct, and I think that being a wonderful, hopeless, and lovable stickler for the rules he went to see Abner in order to “remonstrate” with him. That is what the ethical canons recommend, if a lawyer intends to quit working for such a client. Now comes some more guesswork: once Harry had finished remonstrating, Abner understood that he had grasped the totality of what was going on and was going to withdraw and perhaps also do more. Perhaps he thought Harry had concluded that all the circumstances gave him the right—or even the obligation—to go, for instance, to the FBI. So Abner decided to act preemptively. He hopped on his plane, went to see Hobson, and said, Get Dana off my work. What reasons he gave I cannot tell you because I can’t even begin to guess. He’s so fucking devious. But I’d bet you what you like that it wasn’t a bullshit story like dementia, because Abner knew Harry’s mind was fine and that nobody who spent time with Harry would believe that it wasn’t!

  So you don’t think Brown told Hobson that Harry was losing his mind? I asked, beginning to think that I was losing mine. And why would Hobson have come up with it?