Killer, Come Hither

by Louis Begley

  By the way, he added, that road map or something like that is clearly what Hobson and that idiot Minot were trying to find when they searched Harry’s papers.

  I nodded.

  There is another aspect of the problem, Simon continued, and it involves me just as much as Kerry. Abner Brown and his companies are very important clients of the firm. What you’re proposing to do, probably with Kerry’s assistance and my blessing, involves the loss of their business. I don’t need to tell you that in today’s economic environment, with once-great law firms going into bankruptcy and others shedding partners, associates, and staff, that is not a trifling matter. The simple answer, though, is that we’re not in the practice of law in order to close our eyes to criminal activities of our clients. That is, by the way, very different from representing someone who has been accused of a crime. I’m sure you understand that. Criminal defendants are entitled to counsel. To cut to the chase, I think you should show your road map to Kerry and see what she thinks it means to an informed reader. She’s a big girl, and you’re free to tell her about our conversation. I’d like to look at it too. Of course, I’ve got no objection—I’m in no position to object—to your showing it to your friend Scott, though I would warn you against relying on the CIA when it comes to bringing Brown to justice. There are too many crosscurrents there, too many people pulling strings. I think you know what I mean. It’s a job for the Justice Department. Kerry will have views as to how the U.S. attorney should be approached.

  I said I would proceed exactly in accordance with his advice.

  There is something more I should tell you, he added. You should know that our group of seniors met with Will Hobson last Friday. He put on a weak performance, claiming that his personal observation had convinced him that Harry’s cognitive faculties had declined significantly. I don’t believe anyone was favorably impressed. We are meeting again on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, without Will. When do you plan to show the map to Kerry?

  I told him it was that same day, in the afternoon.

  In that case, Simon said, I will request a postponement of the senior group’s meeting. We might meet instead on Friday or next Monday. I’d like to be in a position to announce to the group the existence of the road map and what you are doing with it, as well as the imminent withdrawal from the firm of the Brown business. Quite an agenda! I’ll ask for Hobson’s head. I hope they don’t instead offer him mine. As far as I can see, there is nothing innocent about Hobson’s conduct. Whether Minot is an accomplice or a compliant dope remains to be seen. However this shakes out, it will be a severe test for the firm.

  By the way, he said as he was leaving. The stuff about the group of seniors is still strictly between you and me. Right?

  I assured him it was.

  I had one more call to make, and I made it soon after Simon left for the office. It was to Susie. I got her on her cell phone. She happened to be among the orangutans. There had to be a way of wiggling out of taking her on a romantic getaway, and I thought I’d found one.

  Hey, curare man, she greeted me, are you alive or is this your ghost reaching out from the great hunting grounds?

  Alive, I said, alive and calling you from the ultracivilized precincts of Fifth Avenue.

  So the darts worked?

  The threat that I’d use them did. The bad guy won’t bother me or anyone else again. I’m keeping the darts for the next deserving visitor. Here’s the thing: does curare keep its potency?

  I like to hear you use that word, she laughed. Yes, it does. Watch out, I may shoot you with a little dart and have my way with you if we don’t fly off to Paris pretty soon. Make your plan, curare man! Cool! That even rhymes.

  I have a terrific plan. I want you to come to dinner on Wednesday. Fancy dinner, fancy restaurant, and fancy company. I’m going to introduce you to my best friend. D’accord?

  I smell a rat, she said, but d’accord.

  —

  Kerry had been too happy, too distracted, when I picked her up at the airport, panting with relief that I had suffered only the cut above my eye, to grill me then about exactly what had happened between Slobo and me. But there was no ducking the subject when she came to dinner on Monday. I had asked Jeanette to prepare a cold meal. I would serve it and wash up.

  Kerry wore a black silk jersey dress and perilously high heels. No words were needed to tell me she wanted to make love.

  She lowered her eyelids, and I led her to the bedroom.

  We were happy and exhausted and may have dozed off before deciding we’d have a drink and then perhaps taste Jeanette’s dinner. When we were finally at table, speaking about Slobo and Abner Brown could no longer be avoided.

  We can let Martin stand down now, don’t you think? she asked. What a relief! I hate to think how much he charged you.

  Worth every cent, I replied, and I think we should keep him a bit longer. Brown is a vengeful man. I have a feeling that thugs like Slobo are easily replaced. Who’s to say whether he wants to send Slobo Two our way? Let’s see what we do with Harry’s road map and the immediate fallout before making a decision.

  She nodded and said, All right, and now tell me exactly what happened on Saturday night.

  It was my turn to nod and reply that I’d tell her everything, but I first wanted to mention that Scott was coming to the city on Wednesday afternoon and that I hoped she was free so that we could talk about the road map together. This was as good a time as any to speak about my conversation with Simon Lathrop, without mentioning what he had told me about his group of seniors. That was a confidence that had to be respected. She listened carefully and said that asking Simon’s advice, and worrying about where the road map left her, were really thoughtful. I’m glad you’ve done it. I think he’s right about the law and about the firm. We can’t go on working for Brown. Then she consulted her iPhone. She could be free on Wednesday afternoon.

  In that case, I said, let’s meet here.

  And then once more—I was getting so good at it that it made me sick—I told her all, including what I’d withheld before, such as the toys I’d obtained, Scott’s revolver and Susie’s curare, and the nightcap Slobo and I enjoyed at the end. After I’d finished, I played the recording I’d made of Slobo.

  I had been watching with growing despair as a sort of curtain descended between her and me. She was picking at her dessert, mechanically drinking the wine when I refilled her glass, but with each passing minute she was more distant.

  Kerry, I said, sweet Kerry, this is a terrible, violent story. A tragic story that started when that bastard killed Harry. But it’s over now. Finished. What I said about Brown’s perhaps sending Slobo Two is a one-in-a-thousand possibility. A reason to be careful, that’s all. But really all of this is behind us.

  No, it isn’t, Jack, she answered. It will never be behind me. Jack, I thought you killed that bastard in self-defense, to save your own life. But that’s not what happened. You disabled him after he attacked you, and that was great, just what I’d expect of a marine officer, an honest-to-God hero. But then, instead of turning him over to the police, you murdered him! Jack, that’s what you did! You’re not dumb. You know there are laws in this country. You had the goods on him. You had his confession against his interest on tape. He was going straight to prison for the murder of Harry and attempted murder of you, but no, you let him bleed to death, you turned murderer.

  All of a sudden, the refined meal I had served her, the plans I had made for our next weekend in the country, all began to seem like a monstrously bad joke. Or worse. Like coming upon the dead Iraqis whose noses and ears my marines had cut off. I didn’t turn them in for court-martial. I didn’t even hand out company punishment. What was the point? The noses and the ears weren’t going to grow back. I wasn’t about to call the Suffolk County D.A. and turn myself in.

  Kerry, I said, it’s done. What’s done cannot be undone. That Serb bastard tortured my uncle. He tortured my uncle’s lovely cat. A cat whom I had given to Harry and
whom I also loved. He was wanted by Interpol and who knows—Scott will be able to tell—how many other police forces for violent and heinous crimes. I was not content to hand him over to the D.A. and have him plea-bargain his way to twelve, fifteen years in jail. In your heart, you knew that. I never made it a secret.

  —

  She said nothing when we parted in the morning, which put in doubt our sleepover dates for the rest of the week or our weekend in Sag Harbor. My heart was heavy, and I made an effort unmatched in my experience to be gentle and forbearing in our lovemaking. The shock of hearing how I killed Slobo, I told myself, had been extreme. Perhaps she had even noticed how I was crowing when I told her on the phone that I had killed him. Her antennae picked up the most distant and most feeble signals. That I was in shock as well, because of her, was also evident. I was finding myself unable to write.

  —

  I ran and worked out at the gym with Wolf. We made a date for a boys’ steak dinner the following week.

  As agreed, on Wednesday afternoon I got Harry’s document from the bank—I’d grown sick of calling it a road map—and the three of us sat down at Harry’s library table to examine it. In reality, it was Kerry who read it and explained as she went along. It was the diagram of parallel but diametrically opposed universes. One was composed of the Brown companies with which the general public was familiar. Banks and other financial institutions, shipping lines, mining enterprises, some of which were notorious as suspected polluters but all of which were vastly profitable and fully engaged in fending off allegations of illegality, an agricultural empire covering much of Latin America and Romania and Ukraine. The other, a fun-house mirror reflection of the former, marched hand in hand, depending on the field of activity, with North Vietnam or Iran or Hezbollah or the Taliban and its various permutations or al-Qaeda, and in mineral activities with a shadowy arm of the Kremlin. The secret mechanism, easy to state but intricate enough to have withstood the scrutiny of leading firms of auditors, Harry appeared to have discovered almost by accident. It consisted in the existence of twin sets of companies, the “good” companies functioning according to the mores, however shabby, of the marketplace, and the “bad” twins—names and logos so similar you thought they were the same—battening on them like so many cancers. The catalog of crimes was endless and included drug and arms trade, nuclear proliferation, money laundering, evasion of sanctions, child labor, pollution on a scale not imagined before, and human trafficking. A trail of monstrously large payoffs by the bad twins to government officials and other dignitaries sitting on the boards and international advisory councils of the good twins, the placement of the officials’ children, wives, siblings, and cousins in plum positions with the good twins or institutions over which Abner had leverage, an open sewer of corruption.

  The involvement of governments and organizations subject to every imaginable U.S. sanction, with links to international terrorist organizations, drew a long whistle from Scott. My boys will love this, he said. It will be a pleasure to get into the innards of this business.

  But he and Kerry readily agreed that the ball had to be carried by the Justice Department. She knew the U.S. attorney for the Southern District; in fact had worked directly for him when they were both assistant U.S. attorneys, he very much her senior. She said she’d make an appointment for the two of us to see him at the earliest date he could give us. Scott thought it would be best if he didn’t join us. He didn’t want crossed wires. What he needed urgently was a copy of the diagram and a seat next morning on the first shuttle to D.C.

  With mixed feelings of gloom and relief, I announced the dinner plan for the evening, managing to say that it would be a celebration of sorts and a chance for Scott to meet the gorgeous caregiver to orangutans and tigers.

  Kerry said she had to go back to the office first, and then home to dress. Scott wanted to look in on his mother.

  We agreed to meet at the restaurant.

  Epilogue

  Kerry left me. I can’t stand the way you smell when you touch me, she told me. You smell of blood.

  She couldn’t forget the way I killed Slobo. Or forgive me. You’re sick, she kept repeating. And she’d come back to her old theme: We live in a country where there are laws. The rule of law, does that ring a bell? Slobo could have been judged and punished according to the law. But that wasn’t good enough for you. You had to butcher him.

  The rule of law. You bet.

  Perhaps a week after Scott turned over Harry’s notes to his colleagues or bosses at the agency, and Kerry and I did the same to the U.S. attorney, together with such indications as we had of Abner Brown’s involvement in the murder of Harry and the assault on me, I received a call from Brown himself. Someone at Langley must have tipped him off. You fuckhead, he said, I’ll get you. If it isn’t this week or this month, don’t think it won’t come. I’ll hunt you down like the varmint you are. The shithead meddling nephew of a blackmailing queer. I piss on his grave and I’ll piss on yours.

  Tough to do from supermax, I replied. You’d better hurry.

  Will Hobson and Minot left Jones, according to Simon Lathrop in disgrace but with great profit, taking the Brown business with them to a Houston law firm where they formed the nucleus of a team to defend Brown against the storm of criminal proceedings and enforcement actions unleashed by the grand jury, the DEA, the EPA, the Treasury, and the SEC. Moses Cohen sent me links to articles in The American Lawyer and other sheets of that ilk extolling the Brown litigations as the stimulus rescue plan for the legal profession.

  Right-wing and fundamentalist flacks and their media mouthpieces on TV and radio talk shows zeroed in on Harry’s sizable contributions to the winning presidential campaign in ’08 and his support of Democratic candidates in the ’10 congressional election. They smeared Harry as a closeted fag, a rogue lawyer out to destroy Abner Brown because of his backing rock-solid conservative causes and candidates, all the while extolling Brown as a philanthropist and patron of hospitals and museums on a scale not seen since John D. Rockefeller. Rebuffed and put in his place by Abner Brown, the narrative went, who indignantly rejected his dastardly attempts at blackmail, and faced with the loss of Brown business, Harry Dana hanged himself, following the example set by Judas.

  The reputation of the dead is like a soccer ball kids kick about in an empty lot. No slander or libel laws protect it.

  Meanwhile, the tabloids extolled my courage and martial skills. The typical headline trumpeted: “America’s Leading Young Writer and War Hero Fights Off Dangerous Armed Assailant.” Lou Brennan had me back on his Fox News show and showed deep concern that the murderer could have taken advantage of the revelations about my schedule in Sag Harbor I’d made so innocently during our previous interview. Even the Times devoted half a column to the troubling instance of criminal activity in the peaceful village of Sag Harbor that had put my exemplary courage to the test.

  No problem. I am a warrior.

  My effort at matchmaking succeeded. Susie left the Bronx Zoo to live with Scott in his flounder house in Alexandria. Her new job is at the National Zoo, and her new specialty is the loving care of pandas. Bucking the current trend, Scott and she intend to marry. He’s asked me to be the best man.

  My writer’s block receded. I was able to finish the portraits of my four marine brothers. The book has been accepted for publication by my editor.

  But it proved too difficult to write, or even pass weekends, at the house in Sag Harbor. My hope to lift the curse hanging over it has not been fulfilled.

  I’ve taken refuge in a locanda on Torcello, where many years ago Harry used to spend a week each September. Visits to the basilica and the study of its great mosaic of the Last Judgment have been my sole distraction. It is on that tiny lagoon island that I have written much of this story and ruminated on the rule of law in my country in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author is profoundly grateful to his friend Matthew Blument
hal, who served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps; his friend and law partner Mark P. Goodman; and his friend and physician, Daniel I. Richman, for drawing on their fields of expertise to offer him comments and suggestions of inestimable value.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Louis Begley’s previous novels are Memories of a Marriage, Schmidt Steps Back, Matters of Honor, Shipwreck, Schmidt Delivered, Mistler’s Exit, About Schmidt, As Max Saw It, The Man Who Was Late, and Wartime Lies, which won the PEN/Hemingway award and the Aer/Lingus International Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has been translated into fourteen languages.