In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  “Wait and see,” Klay said.

  Billy eyed Klay for a moment. “Emphasis on ‘wait’?”

  “You got it.” Klay glanced at his phone again.

  He was ready for a new assignment. He’d told Porfle, but Porfle said he didn’t have anything for him. He could have been wrong, but Porfle sounded like he didn’t want to have anything for him. The only good news from all this delay was that physically he was much improved. His sling was gone. His range of motion had returned. Nerves in his right hand tingled from time to time, but his doctor said that would resolve.

  Klay picked up his phone and texted Eady. “Anything?” He held the phone in his palm for a moment, willing a response to appear, then set it down on the bar, facedown.

  He nodded at Billy’s sweatshirt. “How’s your grandson doing?”

  “Good,” Billy said. “Carl’s doing real good. They got him on the Shiloh.”

  “Sounds exciting,” Klay said.

  “Sure,” Billy said. “It all sounds exciting.”

  Klay didn’t respond. Instead, he did what a good reporter does when he’s having a conversation: he kept his mouth shut.

  “Ah, you know,” Billy continued. “His old man left my daughter. Kid had to be a man straight out of the cradle. Said he wanted to do something with his life. Not just a job, an adventure kind of thing. I told him there’s lots of adventures don’t mean getting your head blown off, but what does an old man like me know, right? I’m so smart what am I doing pouring rail booze to has-beens? Present company excluded,” he apologized. “Anyway, kid says he wants to be like his granddad. I told him I was drafted. He thinks I was a war hero.”

  “From what I hear you were.”

  “What’s that get you?”

  “You feel responsible,” Klay said.

  Billy shrugged.

  “Go Army!” Phil the Economist blurted.

  Both men looked down the bar. Billy pointed his finger. “I’ll give you that one,” he said. “No more.”

  Phil’s eyebrows shot up. He wasn’t used to being addressed directly. He was large and soft with a few sprigs of hair left on a pale head. He wore a gray sweatshirt over gray sweatpants and black sneakers, giving him the appearance of a manatee with a Jack and Coke between his flippers. He sipped his drink and watched the game.

  “Carl did real well in school,” Billy said to Klay. “Loved engineering. Had plenty of offers in the private sector. Turned them all down. Says there’s nobody doing what the military does. But I do worry about him.”

  “I’m sure he’s in good hands. Seventh Fleet, right?”

  “That’s right. Lucky Seventh,” Billy said, bitterly. “MacArthur’s Navy. Twenty thousand sailors now. All circling the South China Sea.” Billy looked at a tattoo on his forearm too old and faded for Klay to read. “Seems like we can’t ever get away from that place.”

  “Well, it’s a different world now,” Klay said.

  On the television, the midshipmen were marching onto the field, lining up by company.

  “Doesn’t look different,” Billy said. “They’ve got the Shiloh on stand-down. You’ve seen the news, right?”

  Klay had not paid much attention to the news since his return from Kenya. Everything on it seemed like a version of Bernard’s killing.

  “No, Bill. What’d I miss?”

  “Carl says it’s nothing. Seventh Fleet’s been having accidents. The Fitzgerald got rammed by a Japanese cargo ship. Dead of night, sent her into a full 360 spin, full red over red. Seven dead. Then McCain turns into the path of a thirty-thousand-ton Liberian oil tanker—ten more boys gone. Maybe it was girls. I don’t know. Champlain ran over a fishing boat—that’s an Aegis cruiser like the Shiloh. All South China Sea. Modern Navy. How modern is that?”

  “Not very,” Klay said. He glanced at his lifeless cell phone.

  “I asked him, ‘How can a destroyer sail into an oil tanker?’ ‘All explainable, Pops,’ he tells me.” Billy reached under the bar and brought out a dented Famous Amos cookie tin. He pried off the lid. Inside were carefully folded letters. “I don’t go in for email,” he said, digging through the papers. He took out a letter. “He says it was the OOD plotting radar track for the wrong goddamn ship. SCS screwup, the CO shifting thrust control to the lee helmsman without telling him. Sloppy anchoring. Radar malfunction.” Billy looked up. “How does that happen?”

  “I don’t know, Bill,” Klay said. He hadn’t understood a word Billy had said. On the television, CBS was showing drone shots of the Naval Academy brigade lined up by company. “You gotta be proud of him, though.”

  Billy smiled. “Yeah. He said all that time on those video games of his would pay off, and I guess it did.” The older man tapped the bar in front of Klay. “Kid says the computers they’re using onboard are twenty years old. He’s praying the next systems upgrade goes to somebody like Microsoft or Perseus Group.”

  Klay nodded. He almost said, “Makes sense for them,” but caught himself. He sipped his drink and concentrated on the television. West Point’s cadets were marching onto the field now, dressed in somber gray and black.

  “Sink Navy!” Phil shouted, raising a fist.

  “That’s it.” Billy came out from behind the bar with a nightstick in his hand. “Up,” Billy said.

  Phil hunkered his head into his shoulders and stared straight ahead. Billy took hold of Phil’s collar with his left hand, inserted the tip of his nightstick under Phil’s right armpit, and pressed. The big man sprang from his stool—arms and legs out—like a wooden toy, and Billy marched him from his stool. To Klay’s surprise he didn’t lead Phil to the door. Instead, he moved him three seats down and released him. Then he slid Phil’s half-empty Jack and Coke down to him. Phil gulped the rest of his drink, visibly shaken. He reached into his sweatpants, slapped his money on the bar, and waited for Billy to pour him a fresh one. Billy set a fresh Jack and Coke in front of Phil. “You can have your seat back when the game starts, Phil. But you keep your opinions to yourself.”

  Phil sipped his drink, staring straight ahead, a quiet smile on his lips.

  “Remind me not to mess with you,” Klay said.

  “Little shore patrol move. I learned it the hard way.” Billy folded his grandson’s letter and put it back in the cookie tin. He returned the tin to its place under the bar. “Anyway, I’m hoping no more accidents.”

  Klay’s cell phone buzzed. It was a text from Eady.

  * * *

  • • •

  On Monday morning Klay looked up to see Eady standing in his doorway. He checked his watch. “I was on my way up in ten.”

  Eady shut Klay’s door. He navigated the stacks of unfiled documents littering Klay’s floor and placed a thin red folder on Klay’s desk.

  Klay opened the folder and scanned the top document, a two-page file summary printed on pale blue paper. A priest. The Philippines. Unholy.

  “You said it was going to be Botha.”

  “He’s Botha’s Asia connection,” Eady explained. “Ivory on its way to China. We may have to slay this Hydra one head at a time.”

  Klay shook his head as he turned the file’s pages. “This priest’s a pedophile, Vance.”

  “A chance to do some extra good,” Eady said.

  Klay closed the file. “I don’t know what your source is on this, but I’ve studied Botha. He wouldn’t partner with a pedophile.”

  “You know this for a fact?”

  “My gut says,” Klay said.

  “Fortunately, your gut doesn’t work for me.”

  Klay pushed back from his desk. Eady rarely visited the third floor. His colleagues would be at the edges of their cubbyhole offices straining to hear their discussion. Fox’s office was next door. If Klay struck the wall with his fist, he was sure he’d hear Fox yelp.

  “Look, Vance. Botha had . . . Both
a has a younger brother, Dirk. They say when he was a boy, Dirk showed extraordinary promise as a swimmer. He was so good that his swim coach, the local priest, would drive out to the Botha farm and pick Dirk up to make sure he didn’t miss practice. The priest took the boy for drives sometimes, because if he was going to be a world champion, he needed to see the world. Then one day Dirk told his brother what happened on those drives. They found the priest with his throat cut, hanging from a tree. His car was parked nearby. Ras had written ‘I did it’ on the windshield with a bar of soap, and signed his name and address. He was thirteen.”

  Eady cleared his throat. “Not a perfect fit. I’ll grant you. That’s fine. No criminal network is consistent all the way through. I am a bit surprised, though. I assumed you’d take every opportunity to go after Botha.”

  Klay punched the wall. There was a commotion from Fox’s office. It sounded like a chair falling over.

  “You know I would,” Klay said. “I’m on it.”

  “Good,” Eady said, and tapped the file with his fingertip. “‘There’s always a who,’ isn’t that what you like to say? Well, this is one of them.” He turned as he was opening the door. “And just so we’re clear, Tom. This is an assignment. It’s not a democracy. The public—”

  “—has an interest,” Klay said. “Yeah. I know. I have an interest, too.”

  ON THE HUNT

  Manila and Cebu Island, Philippines

  Klay arrived at the Open Orchid, a shabby hotel in Manila’s old red-light district not far from the American embassy. He set his duffel bag on the floor beside the front desk. “Reservation for Flanagan,” he said, and handed over a passport. “Three nights,” he added, and paid in advance, though he would only stay for one. Klay leaned an elbow on the counter while the thin Filipino clerk jotted his details with a ballpoint pen. “This hotel was recommended by Monsignor Martelino.” The clerk’s pen paused, then continued scribbling.

  Across the lobby, a big man who looked to be in his fifties waited for an elevator beside a Filipino boy, maybe nine or ten years old. The man had a football lineman’s size, but there was something not American in his carriage. Hawaiian shirt. Too-short shorts. Sandals with the socks pulled up. German or Australian, Klay guessed.

  Klay cleared his throat to get the man’s attention. He wanted to see his face. The big man tilted his head and spoke to the boy. Klay heard bits of German. The man kept his back to Klay until he and the boy were inside the elevator. Then he turned and stared at Klay without expression, his hand on the boy’s scrawny shoulder as the elevator doors closed. Ownership.

  Klay felt revulsion turn in his gut, but he had his assignment, and it didn’t start here. He accepted his fake passport back from the clerk and shouldered his bag. Next to the front desk was the doorway to the hotel’s bar-restaurant, the bar a five-stool setup serving bottom-shelf liquor under brown palm fronds. An elderly woman sat behind the bar turning pages in a magazine, smoking a cigarette. Beyond the bar was the restaurant. Klay smelled overheated food. “Pork sisig,” a chalkboard said. He ordered his dinner with the bartender and went up to his room.

  A waiter arrived with his food, laid a tray on the foot of his bed, and asked if there would be anything else.

  “No,” Klay said, handing him a tip.

  “Are you certain?” the young man said. “Boy or girl, doesn’t matter.”

  There was a shrewdness in the teenager’s eyes. A certainty in his smile.

  “I’m tired,” Klay said and pointed a finger toward the door.

  He ate his dinner of a roasted half chicken and French fries, drank the beer. He checked his phone. He carried his dinner tray to the hallway and left it outside his door, then returned to his room and looked at the bed. It was just after seven in the evening local time. For him it was three a.m. He wouldn’t sleep. He popped a ceiling tile in the back of his closet and hid his laptop there. The safe was anything but. He put on his boots, took the elevator down, and walked the neighborhood. He could move his arm without real pain as long as he didn’t try to do anything too sudden. His ribs hurt just enough to remind him he needed to exercise.

  It was early evening, but late enough in this part of town. Prostitutes dotted Ermita’s sewage-damp sidewalks. Thin men rose up like grass eels, calling out, “Cialis!” “Viagra!” A block from his hotel, he passed a man walking a dwarf on a leash. The little person wore a leather harness around his body with a handle along his spine. His T-shirt said, “Toss Me!”

  “Mister, mister!” A woman tugged his shirt. She held by the hand a young girl, perhaps eight, wearing a pink dress. The little girl turned her palm up. Klay felt street eyes on him, watching to see what he would do.

  “Mister,” the girl’s mother pleaded.

  He bought a cup of coffee from a street cart, and left ten times the coffee’s cost in change on the counter. He looked at the mother and kept walking. She snatched his money and rejoined him. “Mister. You like my daughter? You want to marry her? Take her to America? Marry her for one hour?”

  Two blocks later she was gone, and so was his interest in exploring the neighborhood. He returned to his hotel, got a few hours’ sleep, then took a cab to the airport, and boarded a flight for Cebu Island.

  * * *

  • • •

  Klay’s target wore black-framed eyeglasses and long white robes emblazoned with the head of a Christ child in gold thread. The fat priest stood at the front of his altar and raised an ivory Christ child above his head for his parishioners to admire. This was the beginning of the annual ceremony called the Hubo, a Cebuano word meaning “to undress.” The Santo Niño de Cebu icon in his hands was the size of a house cat, dressed as a boy king.

  Martelino removed the icon’s tiny crown, slipped off its little black boots, unfastened its scarlet cape and gold belt, and removed its tunic. Then he produced a curved knife from the sleeve of his tunic and sliced the back of the doll’s white underwear, which fell to a golden bowl held by an altar boy. Hundreds of sweating parishioners sang out, “Christe exaudi nos.”

  He carried the naked doll to a large barrel of water and began to bathe it, before handing it to his assistants, who quickly redressed it in simpler clothes. Afterwards, Martelino used the bathwater to bless his followers.

  * * *

  • • •

  I enjoyed your service, Father,” Klay said, and accepted a mango slice from a dish an altar boy held out to him. The priest sat behind a heavy Spanish desk across from Klay, in his modest office at the back of the church. Outside, the church’s recessional bells chimed. Sunlight filtered into the priest’s office through a capiz-shell screen.

  Martelino leaned forward and plucked a date from the dish. “You were easy to recognize,” he replied, chewing his date. “Few kneel before God anymore.” He glanced at the altar boy, whose dark eyes dropped to the floor and stayed there.

  “That’s Sister Marie,” Klay said. “No one eats that flesh without first adoring it. It was on the tongue or off to hell.” He rubbed his knuckles. “She was a tough one.”

  Martelino sighed. “Paul the Sixth.” He spread his hands. “So, what can I do for you, Tomas. Is it Tomas?”

  “Tomas, yes,” Klay said. “Thomas O’Shea. O’Shea Funeral Home Corporation.” Klay placed a business card on Martelino’s desk.

  “Ah, a mortician. So, you understand the importance of rituals.”

  “Without them we are out of business.”

  “Which did you enjoy most?” Martelino asked, chewing.

  “The Hubo—”

  “No, of course. What else have you seen?”

  “Well,” Klay said. “The fluvial procession was something. It was overwhelming for me, as an American Catholic.”

  Klay was tired. He had decided to approach the priest during the country’s Santo Niño festival, when millions of Catholics flock to Cebu. Klay had risen at three a.m. to walk, c
arrying a small white candle with tens of thousands of believers, talking quietly with them about faith. It was hard not to be moved by the conviction of the people he encountered, especially the many poor, sick, and frail. Most of these ceremonies involved a passing of the hat, taking whatever these faithful could spare. Theater was everywhere. At its most extreme, he watched a Santo Niño icon declared the navy’s supreme captain general and granted command of a navy patrol ship, which it then captained across Mactan Channel, escorted by four patrol ships, two coast guard cutters, a pair of helicopters dropping flowers, and a maritime parade of devotees in hundreds of small boats.

  “Oh, I know you Americans find our traditions absurd.”

  “Oh no, Father.”

  “Please,” Martelino said. “I myself find it all ridiculous. But the people want these things. They insist. And it doesn’t weaken their belief to see the Santo Niño sailing a battleship. It strengthens it. I myself have no doubt of our Lord. I’ve seen too much of Satan’s work not to believe.” He waved his hands. “The circus acts. The magic shows. The baby clothes. We need them. I even make things up and the people follow,” the priest said. “We had a vigil last night. The camareras sat in a room all night waiting for the Santo Niño to come alive.” He laughed.

  An air conditioner was doing its best, but the room was hot and Martelino was already growing rancid beneath his heavy robes. Klay could smell him.

  “You seem to know exactly what the people need, Father,” Klay said.

  The priest waved an arm dismissively. “I told them I had a bad stomach. I went home to bed. Let them stay up all night. Now, what would you like to talk about?”

  “I am a mortician. A family tradition. When my great-grandfather started the business, death was a solemn occasion. A time for religious reflection. Families went to church. Now my nephews play video games on Sundays. My brother’s wife can’t be bothered to take them to church.”

  “Women are weak,” the priest said. “You are not married?”