In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  Klay heard the crack of a rifle shot. Bernard’s eyelids fluttered. The Samburu ranger seemed surprised, as if someone familiar had called out his name. Klay dove forward, tackling Bernard to the ground. He didn’t hear the second shot. Klay’s senses inverted. Sound turned to light. Light became touch. He tasted the bullet’s impact, he would later recall. And then he was falling.

  HOMECOMING

  Dulles, Virginia, and Washington, DC

  Klay awoke as the plane dipped toward Dulles International Airport and the green fields of northern Virginia came into view. It was late morning. He adjusted his arm uncomfortably. The bullet had passed through his right shoulder below the clavicle. He’d suffered bruised ribs and a brain-numbing concussion in the long fall. The doctors in Nairobi said he would be fine.

  Bernard was dead.

  The politician was dead, too, and the elephant had been nowhere near their location.

  “Are you finished, sir?” a flight attendant asked, and he realized she’d already asked him once.

  He looked down at the tiny Chivas bottles littering his tray. “I’m finished,” he replied.

  An anti-poaching operation gone bad, Kenya’s Daily Nation had speculated. Land dispute, ran a competing theory.

  Klay knew differently. He had the Botha file. Ras Leopold Botha, age forty-nine. He was born in Musina, South Africa. Father a local police officer, mother a housewife. Botha himself had been a cop once, supplementing his policeman’s salary running stolen cars across the border, shipping them on to Mozambique. Working the syndicate with his brother, Dirk. The two men buying up property, opening a professional hunting company, Botha Brothers Safaris. Ras was the dominant brother, the imaginative one.

  They had met once before. Klay was investigating elephant poaching in South Africa, and Ras Botha was a necessary stop for any journalist making that trip. Most reported Botha’s name without speaking to him. Botha was not an easy man to track down, and he didn’t talk to the press. Klay got lucky. Botha had been on trial in Pretoria, charged with murdering one of his Russian dancers. Klay attended the trial. On the last day, Botha had testified on his own behalf. The Afrikaner’s defense was simple. “You don’t vermoorden ass like that,” he told the judge. “You fuck it.”

  Afterwards, Klay sat in a visitors’ room, looking at the man through scratched Plexiglas. Someone had ripped the phone off the wall on Klay’s side of the window, so they yelled at each other through holes drilled in the Plexiglas.

  “I run the ivory trade in Africa,” Botha shouted. He was short and stocky, with a square head, protruding ears, and black crew cut hair. Two prisoners flanked him, a cell phone in each of their hands, all of them Botha’s. The Octopus, they called him.

  Klay laughed at the bold confession. Botha saying it matter-of-fact, like he was a businessman.

  “You mean the poaching, Botha,” Klay had replied. “You run the poaching in Africa.”

  Botha slammed a fist into the Plexiglas. “I’m not a fucking poacher. I’m a hunter. I use the resource. Those elephants are South Africa’s elephants. It’s our decision what to do with them. Not some bleeding-heart Yanks on holiday or some fucking Pommies with an orphanage. Those elephants are property. We own them. And we decide to sell their ivory . . .”

  Klay pushed himself up from his airline seat, sending shock waves of pain into his brain. The plane had arrived at its gate. He retrieved his backpack from the overhead bin using his left hand. He looked down to see that his right hand was trembling. He opened and closed it, trying to steady his nerves. Without succeeding, he filed off the plane.

  * * *

  • • •

  Erin Dougherty was waiting for him as he exited the secure area. He wasn’t expecting anyone, and he might have walked past her, but he couldn’t miss Erin’s big mess of curly red hair. She stood on her toes, avoiding his slinged arm, and kissed him in a way that drew attention, including his.

  “You didn’t have to,” he said, looking down at her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, picking up his duffel bag.

  Klay followed her up the ramp and outside to the parking lot, noting the men turning to stare openly at her as she passed. Erin walked quickly. Her wild hair and pale skin, her athletic body in clothes that didn’t hide it, made her a constant target of male attention. He’d tried to get used to that during their time as a couple, but never had. He would glare into their wolfen faces, or pretend they didn’t exist. It never made any difference. He drove a shoulder through more than a few. That never made a difference, either. She’d laughed at him. “You think walking down a street full of leering strangers is hard? Try fighting off your parents’ friends, the college professor you looked up to,” she said. “Just about every male editor at every place I’ve worked, including The Sovereign.” He tried to imagine it, but he had nothing in his own life that offered a reference, so he went back to glaring and knocking into people.

  But that had been years ago.

  Erin oversaw what most people would call photo captions, but staff at The Sovereign referred to as legends. “God forbid a Sovereign photographer should touch a keyboard. And God help the journalist who thinks she can summarize a picture taken by a Sovereign priest,” she said. Her legends department wrote tiny stories, no more than forty-nine words long, about people, places, and animals they often knew little about. “I was Twitter before Twitter was cool,” she liked to say.

  As they walked to her car, Erin’s perfume floated back to him, carrying memories of Sunday mornings in their house on Capitol Hill, drinking coffee while Aretha played on the stereo, reading the Washington Post, then wandering over to Eastern Market for fresh vegetables. An afternoon workout at the gym. An evening workout in their bed.

  But Sundays had seldom actually been Sundays, he reminded himself. And certainly weren’t once a week. His travel schedule meant “Sunday” came at best every few weeks, and sometimes not for months. Odds were that first day back wasn’t peaceful, either. They almost always fought on his return. The redbrick townhouse was in his name, but they’d picked it out together, intending to make it their home. Six months into their first home improvement project, the place had looked worse than when they’d started. Wallpaper on the open stairwell too high for either of them to reach was left half stripped for months, exposing a wall of cracked plaster to be patched. Painting he’d promised to do remained nothing but unopened buckets and rollers stacked in the coat closet. A small roof leak he said he’d fixed had quietly returned, weakening a bathroom ceiling until it had collapsed on her while she was in the tub. She paid all of their bills not because he didn’t have the money, but because he didn’t do it, and she couldn’t bear the late fees. Duffel bags full of his clothes lined their bedroom, it being easier for him to pick one up and leave again than to refold his clothes and put them in the dresser.

  It was his house, his terms, she said—Was it ever going to be theirs? He had thought so. He bought the damn house intending to fix it up for them to share. Chores weren’t the real issue, of course. Nor were bills. It came down to baggage, but baggage of a different kind, baggage he couldn’t unpack.

  Even before Erin, he found the transition back to daily life in Washington difficult. He spent his first days home from the field lying on the couch, remote in hand, staring at the television to turn his mind off. Depression was always there, like a grizzly bear wandering around a campsite, alarming but not dangerous most of the time. When the bear became aggressive, he took steps to protect himself. He drank less, went to the gym more. He wrote. He searched the internet for his next story. If his depression became overwhelming, he removed the clip from the Glock he kept in his nightstand and hid it from himself.

  Erin changed things for the better, but then came Jakarta, and that one terrible night no one could repair. He’d been sitting in a bar, an Indonesian cover band was playing “Hotel California.” An American woman slid up
beside him. She was beautiful, with wavy black hair and green eyes, drinking Arak Attacks, pineapple juice and coconut palm liquor. She offered him a sip from her straw: “They make you go blind.” She smiled. He ordered one. But how many more? The next morning he sat alone in his hotel room, his head pounding. Something terrible had happened. He couldn’t recall what it was. He reached up and felt a lump on his forehead. He remembered the bar, the woman. He remembered getting behind the wheel of her rental car, saying something about all of the more difficult places he’d driven around the world. There had been a problem with the car’s lights or with its windshield wipers. He remembered squinting against the darkness and the rain. She asked him something, and he turned to her, he remembered that. And then she screamed. The sound of her scream in his mind brought it all back. He turned his attention back to the road just in time to see a boy on a bicycle. He jerked the wheel. He felt the thud of the impact in his chest.

  The events of that night changed everything. He had killed a boy, Adri had been his name, and there was nothing he could do to fix it. He drank less in public after that. More when he was alone. He told Erin about the accident, leaving out the American woman and the extent of his drunkenness. The omission cursed their relationship, of course.

  He tried to be present for her, to overcome what he’d done and who he was because of it. He saw well how he did in her eyes. She had been eager to help him in the beginning, but grew increasingly frustrated. “It’s one thing not to hear from you when you’re gone,” she told him, “but you’re standing right here!” His protective instincts ran too deep, she said. “You protect yourself first and foremost. You know that, right?”

  And so, after a few drinks to dull the impact he would forever feel in his chest, he would get up from the couch and do what happy couples do—go out for dinner, meet up with their friends, tour that new art exhibit.

  * * *

  • • •

  She drove a red Audi. He lowered himself into the passenger seat and she closed his door for him. As he pulled the seat belt across his chest, he noticed a bill from the Congressional Country Club wedged beside the passenger seat and his head cleared. “How’s Grant?” he asked, buckling in.

  She turned to back the car out of its space. “He’s good. He’s in Chicago.”

  Was that an invitation he heard? It had been a decade since their breakup. It had been almost that long since they’d slept together.

  Grant was head of Nike’s government affairs office. Fit, of course. A competitive marathon runner. Intellectual. They’d met while Klay was away. He couldn’t remember the assignment, or even the continent. He remembered all too well the day he returned home. He’d dropped onto the sofa with a beer, switched on the television, and noticed two copies of Runner’s World poking out from underneath the sofa. That was it. No muddy shoe prints exiting the back door. No foreign underwear in their bed. Just two copies of Runner’s World that weren’t current. Erin wasn’t a runner.

  “He’s a good man,” Klay said.

  “Yes, he is,” she said, and smiled expectantly.

  He caught sight of the ring on her left hand and shook his head. “You’re engaged. Wow. Congratulations!” He smiled, pleased to discover he was genuinely happy for her.

  “Yeah, we decided it was about time.”

  He cracked his window and felt a warm late-morning breeze blow across his face. She steered onto the Dulles Access Road, and the Audi gathered speed. Adele was playing on the radio. She turned down the volume. “Do you want to talk about it, Tom?”

  “Not especially.”

  She took her eyes off the road and looked at him. “It’s not your fault.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Look, it’s not my business, but don’t go to that place. Okay? Bad things happen around you because you put yourself in places where bad people are. The Jakarta boy was a terrible accident. Bernard was not your fault.”

  Reductions. The Jakarta boy. Bernard.

  “Do you have any Advil?” he asked.

  “Look in the glove box.”

  He found a bottle and took several.

  “How’s it feel?” she asked.

  “Comes and goes.”

  “You’re not going to like this,” she said as they crossed Arlington Memorial Bridge into Washington, DC. “Porfle has arranged a small party for you.”

  “I’d like to go home.”

  “I know,” she said uncomfortably. “I gave him the spare house key from your office.”

  He sighed. He’d forgotten that he still had a key taped to the back of his top desk drawer.

  “Sorry,” she said. “You don’t have to act surprised.”

  She pulled to the curb in front of his townhouse and parked. She went first up the wrought iron steps, opened the front door with his key, and ushered him in.

  “Surprise!”

  Sovereign staff filled his narrow home. Snaps Kennedy. Mitchell Fox. His research assistant, David Tenchant, and Tenchant’s pregnant wife, Maggie. Tom Burkey and Karen Forsythe, photographers he worked with when Snaps wasn’t available. Two senior editors who were having an affair they thought no one knew about. Staff called them Tweedledee and Tweedledum behind their backs. Other faces. A handful of hipsters dressed like summer lumberjacks he assumed were from television. More strangers sipping mimosas filled his hallway, all the way back to his kitchen.

  A familiar voice rose above the din. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!” Klay’s editor, Alexander Porfle, made his way forward from the dining room. Porfle was lean, a few years older than Klay, and British. He had narrow-set blue eyes, sparse hair he parted on the side, and that stiff-legged, terrified posture they appreciate at the Westminster dog show. He wore a navy-blue blazer over an open-collared white dress shirt and penny loafers, no socks.

  Porfle thrust out his hand to shake Klay’s, saw the sling, and awkwardly patted Klay’s chest instead. He turned to the room. “We’re all sorry for your loss, Tom. But it is a reminder, a lethal reminder to us all, that it is a dangerous world out there our Mr. Klay inhabits. He is—and I have long said this, so I don’t feel it inappropriate to repeat myself now—a sniper, a man who trains his rifle on unsavory human beings few of us can even countenance, let alone confront.”

  “Oh, honestly, Alex.” Hadley Porfle pushed her husband aside and kissed Klay lightly. “We won’t stay,” she whispered into his ear. “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “That’s what he is,” Porfle continued, for everyone to hear. “And you all should know it. Mr. Klay, our Good Christian Soldier, identifies targets with me on the scope, and he takes them down. This was a small setback,” he said, turning to Klay. “We’ll get that bastard, my boy. Your pen and my pencil. The old Sov is behind you.” Porfle raised his glass. “To Tom Klay, master of the upright pronoun!”

  “Hear! Hear!”

  Klay thanked Porfle, drank his champagne, greeted colleagues clustered in his front room, and then made his way deliberately down the crowded narrow hallway to the kitchen. He didn’t recognize a single person nibbling catered Greek food, sipping white wine, talking across his granite island, leaning against the stainless refrigerator.

  Klay didn’t cook, but shopping for this house he’d liked the idea of himself as a cook, with a wife like Erin who liked to cook, too. She’d had the same idea. And though the house needed plenty of work elsewhere, they’d walked in, seen the farmhouse sink, the gas-fueled Viking stove, and the Sub-Zero refrigerator, and they felt sure this would be their home.

  They talked about throwing dinner parties, their many interesting friends laughing together in the living room, pouring really nice, full-bodied cabernet using those big-bowled glasses actually designed for drinking cabernet, while he and Erin, wearing amusing, insider-joke aprons they’d bought for each other, served dishes discovered in Bon Appétit. Although none of that had remotely come to pass
—not Erin, not learning to cook, not matching wineglasses, not a single dinner party—it had been that idea, and this kitchen, that had sold him on the house.

  “Going to get some air,” he muttered, squeezing past his guests. He slid open the kitchen’s glass door and stepped onto the small deck. He was closing the kitchen door when Erin stepped onto the deck with him and slid the door closed.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry about the party.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “Everybody was worried about you, you know. Even Porfle, no matter what he was talking about in there.”

  “I get it.”

  She waited a moment, then sighed. “You’re already closed down, aren’t you?”

  It was what he did. No distractions. He wanted Botha.

  “Look,” she said, finally, “I’m going back to your party.” She looked at the deck’s back gate. “Wherever you’re off to, don’t blame yourself, okay?”

  He unlatched the gate, walked down an alley to the street, and hailed a cab.

  “The Sovereign, please,” he said. He didn’t need to say more—every cabbie in the city knew the famous magazine’s headquarters. The driver took East Capitol, turned right past the Supreme Court, and headed up Constitution. It was about as impressive a commute as one could ask for, Klay guessed. He leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.

  He’d had only one good relationship in the years since Erin.

  Hungry Khoza was brilliant and funny and stunningly beautiful. They’d met at an Interpol conference in Lyon, France, where she was leading a panel on balancing the power between a state and its citizens. As a South African, she spoke with captivating authority. He raised his hand and asked what difference rules made when the state in question was corrupt. “American, right?” she responded. It was the beginning of a conversation that seemed destined to last forever.