In the Company of Killers

by Bryan Christy

  Klay set the bag on the counter. Botha’s eyes lingered a moment on the bag; then he plucked napkins from a dispenser and grabbed a handful of ketchup packets.

  “I see they put you up for a big award on that story,” he said. “You’ll look good in a tux. I got five tuxes. One I wore to Pablo Escobar’s wedding. You let me know when you’re ready to spend some time. We’ll share a cognac, two or three girls. Have ourselves a braai. We can do a little elephant hun—”

  Klay grabbed Botha’s shirt front, driving him backwards along the counter, crushing the milkshakes into his chest. One dropped to the floor and splattered. People gasped. Merlin looked up. Klay saw the boy’s wide eyes and released Botha.

  Botha laughed. “You a crazy motherfucker, Klay!”

  A security guard was moving in their direction.

  “You’ll find out,” Klay snarled. “I’ll see you again.”

  Botha was still laughing, wiping milkshake off his shirt as Klay left the restaurant.

  “Ya, okay,” Botha called after him. “You want me in prison. Okay. But remember, my bru, the cage you’re in is not always the cage you’re in.”

  That night, on the long flight home, Klay closed his eyes and replayed the events following Bernard’s murder. There was a ball of sound, Bernard’s head pitched forward. Next he was lying in the back of a Land Rover on his way to Nanyuki army base, Moses the Green Guardian beside him, Goodson shouting into his phone, “From The Sovereign! A man from The Sovereign!” Then a helicopter ride. A room with pale green paint peeling off the wall and a sputtering fluorescent light. The smell of rubbing alcohol. A fat black man with jaundiced eyes and a small mustache leaning over him, sweat in the creases of his neck. The doctor rushing, barely examining him. More yelling. Bernard’s voice. No. Bernard was dead. Maybe his own voice. Then a boy on his bicycle. Crunching metal, screeching brakes. A thud in his chest. The red lights of an ambulance . . .

  Klay wrenched himself upright in his seat. Cold sweat covered his forehead. His memories and dreams were becoming one nightmare, the accident in Jakarta weaving itself into his experience in Kenya.

  He forced himself to focus on the details he knew to be real. After the fat doctor, he had awoken in a different room. This one was clean, brightly lit, cool. A padded strap held his arm to his side. His wound had been dressed and bandaged. A tall woman stood beside his bed listening to his heart with a stethoscope. She gave him a bright smile, and ticked off his vitals to a nurse. “You are very, very lucky, Mr. Klay,” she said. “You will be fine. Able to fight for our elephants again . . .” The strap was for his wound, she told him. He had been dreaming. “Throwing your arms every which way.”

  On his return home, Klay had gone to Georgetown University Hospital for a follow-up. The doctor who examined him said there was nothing more he could do for his injuries. “Your Kenyan surgeon was excellent,” he said.

  Had all of that been courtesy of Ras Botha?

  And what cage?

  THE PUBLIC HAS AN INTEREST

  Washington, DC, and Shepherdstown, West Virginia

  It was Saturday at the Pigeon. Klay was typing up his notes on the priest, sketching a story. Phil the Economist was reading a newspaper. A couple of French tourists were sitting at a table behind Klay. He could see them in the bar’s back mirror. The French newspaper Le Figaro had recently done a feature on the decline of American journalism, and had included a mention of the Gray Pigeon. The story had inspired a few tourists to visit over the past month. Billy asked one for a translation. “You are like Popeye,” the tourist explained, and made a muscle. Billy smiled, but the tourist continued, “Like Popeye with no ship to sail.”

  Next to Klay’s laptop was a tuna fish sandwich and a bag of chips he’d bought at the bodega next door. He was drinking cranberry and seltzer in a pint glass. “You want an umbrella with that?” Billy had asked.

  His cell phone rang. It was Porfle.

  “You did it again, I see.”

  Klay ate a potato chip and typed in another search. “What’s that?”

  “Went over my head for your assignment.”

  “I assumed Vance cleared it with you.”

  “Nope. Didn’t.”

  Klay plucked a corner of the plastic wrap around his sandwich and tried to shake it free. “Okay, sorry,” he said.

  He wished he’d been able to steal the priest’s photo of the peace negotiations dinner, but Martelino had scooped all of the photos up and returned them to his desk drawer.

  “What are you working on?” Porfle asked. “Botha again?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back to the office.”

  “The thrill is gone from this relationship, Mr. Klay,” Porfle said.

  “What do you want from me, Alex?” It was a mistake to engage the passive-aggressive Porfle, but Klay was tired, and the smell of the priest and his sadistic crimes still lingered in his nostrils.

  “I want you to follow procedure,” Porfle said. “I want you to discuss story ideas with me in advance! I want you to write up the formal proposals we’ve agreed on and submit them for consideration at our pitch meetings—with projected word counts and budgets included. I want you to get your expense reports in.”

  Klay pictured his editor sitting pencil-straight in a home-office desk chair, eyes watering, hand trembling as he gripped the phone. “Our essential Brit,” Eady would say, followed by a caution: “We need him in place, Tom.” Klay understood Eady’s desire to have a malleable and obedient deputy, but it didn’t make working for Porfle any easier.

  “When you get back, I want your expenses turned in promptly,” Porfle continued, his voice rising. “The next day.”

  Klay didn’t have the heart to tell Porfle he was already home. Eady had been clear: “You are to endure Porfle. It took me years to find him . . .”

  Klay gritted his teeth. “Of course. I apologize, Alex. It came up suddenly. I’ll get them to Accounting right away.”

  “You’re not the only wildlife crime investigator in this city, you know.”

  “Tell that to Vance,” Klay said, and instantly regretted it.

  “Uncle Vance won’t be around here to protect you forever. You should keep that in mind.”

  “You know something I don’t?”

  “Humph,” Porfle said, and hung up.

  “Everything okay?” Billy asked, wiping down the bar.

  Klay shook his head. “Just the usual, Bill.” He munched another chip, unwrapped his sandwich, and thought about his peculiar double life.

  * * *

  • • •

  He had been with the magazine five years when one bright February afternoon Sally had phoned from upstairs to say that Vance and Ruth Eady had an extra ticket to the Kennedy Center. Schubert’s Trout Quintet. Would he like to join them? A dinner party invitation followed a week later at the couple’s Watergate apartment. “Bring a date if you like.” Klay was with Erin at the time, against office policy, so he went alone. A few weeks after the Eadys’ dinner party, Vance appeared in his doorway. “Do you fly-fish, Tom?”

  The Eadys owned a big old house in Virginia horse country about sixty miles west of DC. Standing on the grassy banks of his trout pond, Eady had handed Klay a fly rod and a Bible. “Hold the book tight in your armpit. Keep your movement ten and one. Wrist straight, hard stops.” Klay followed Eady’s instructions while Eady went on about tippets and dry flies. He was finally getting the hang of it when Eady deftly turned the conversation to a topic Klay knew well: old-school boxing—Jack Johnson, Harry Greb, Ali, the Hitman, Marvelous Marvin. All of it a fishing expedition, Klay realized later. Eady letting out line, biding his time, monitoring Klay’s response to each upstream twitch.

  “You used to be pretty good in the ring yourself, they tell me,” Eady said casually as he packed up their gear. Ruth Eady was standing at the top of the hill, calling them t
o supper.

  “Who tells you?” Klay asked.

  “People.”

  Klay shrugged. “I was South Broad good. Not North Broad good. There’s a big difference in Philadelphia.”

  Klay told Eady what it had been like boxing as a teenager, working the bag in a rowhouse basement gym off Ninth Street in the Italian Market, the soppressata and capocollo drying on strings, swinging to the beat. Bap. Bap. Bap. Klay dreaming of winning those Golden Gloves. Getting told his feet were buckets of cement. “You no Primo Carnera,” the old Sicilian barked at him. “You gotta mean. You gotta quick. You gotta fast.” But the bodies stacking up said maybe his coach had it wrong. Maybe Klay was fast enough already. Maybe his feet moved so fast nobody could see them.

  Then came the Fight.

  His opponent was out of Joe Frazier’s Gym on North Broad. Bryant “Lump” Sanders had the look of a heavyweight and a sledgehammer right hand. Klay had fought bigger men who hit harder, but in the fourth round, when Klay wasn’t looking, Sanders’s brothers had climbed into the ring with him. Maybe his sister, too. How else to explain that many gloves landing on him at once. Klay learned the meaning of the word “speed” that night. The doctor inspecting Klay’s eye afterwards told him sure, he could keep fighting, but he was laughing. “We’ll call you Helen ‘the Keller’ Klay.”

  “But you liked it?” Eady pressed, studying Klay’s eyes.

  Klay sensed he was entering a life moment. Here he was, a Philadelphia mortician’s kid, standing in a Virginia country mansion, talking to the editor in chief of The Sovereign, a man who rarely spoke to writers directly and never invited them to his home. It all felt so unreal, so completely foreign, he decided to act against his instincts. He told Eady the truth. He didn’t like boxing; he loved it. “No better feeling in the world than dropping a guy with a clean shot.”

  Eady took a moment before responding. “How about a shot that’s not so clean?” he countered. Presenting the fly.

  They were in the summer kitchen now, Eady standing over a small table covered in newspaper, working a fillet knife up a trout’s belly, Klay seeing things he’d sensed about Eady come into focus.

  “So—” Eady turned to face him. “Would you like a second job? It’s called the CIA’s National Resources Division, Tom. You’d work for me. Exclusively.”

  “Natural Resources Division?”

  Eady laughed. “National. National Resources, Tom.”

  “I thought the CIA couldn’t work domestically.”

  Eady ripped the fish’s guts free, yanked them toward the fish’s throat, then sliced them loose. He tossed the organs into a pail.

  “We can. And we do. Most of NR’s work is debriefing American business executives returned from overseas trips. College professors and scientists back from foreign conferences. It’s light, informal. Maintenance, really. You would be something a bit more . . .” Eady searched for the right word. “Intentional.”

  A caddis fly—that’s how Eady put it—a simple gatherer of information with antennae so long and slender as to be nearly invisible.

  Eady turned on the deep well sink, rinsed his knife, and began washing his hands under the tap using a bar of soap. “You’ll be part of an unheralded, secret tradition, Tom. The Sovereign’s partnership with the Agency stretches back generations. Before CIA was CIA.”

  He switched off the tap, slid his knife blade through a towel, and hung it on a magnetic knife rack beside the sink. “The Brits got us started. They ran a propaganda shop out of Rockefeller Center, pumped anti-Nazi stories to the old Herald Tribune, the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, trying to get the Americans to join them in the fight. Pearl Harbor sped things up, and the Brits handed their operation over to our OSS. Morale operations, it became. Many of America’s best reporters, writers, cartoonists, and radio broadcasters served the war effort.”

  Eady opened a cabinet above his sink and took out a bottle of scotch. He poured two glasses and handed one to Klay.

  “The Sovereign’s role was something special,” he continued. “Richard Helms, future CIA director—who recruited me, incidentally—started out as a journalist with the United Press. Dick interviewed Hitler. Hitler was obsessed with America’s eugenics programs. Wanted to know all he could about it. The American argument distilled, being that healthier humans meant lower taxes.”

  Eady opened a door separating the kitchen from the main house, and three Jack Russell terriers darted into the room. “Ruth!” he called, ignoring the dogs. “Ruth!”

  Ruth Eady, a petite woman with neat gray hair, a sad smile, and the hands of a persistent gardener, appeared in the doorway holding a plate of cheese and raw vegetables. She wore a bright yellow apron over a pale blue blouse.

  “We’ll join you in ten or so, darling,” Eady said, accepting the snack plate.

  Ruth looked from Eady to Klay and then down at the glass of scotch beside each man. She picked up Eady’s glass, took a sip, and placed the glass back on the counter beside him. “I’ll wait ’til I see the whites of your eyes.” She smiled and picked up the dish with Eady’s trout. “Come on, dogs.”

  “Find yourself a good woman, Tom,” Eady said, topping off their glasses. “I could start with that. Or end there. Have you?”

  Klay thought of Erin. “Not sure,” he said.

  “To the chase, then,” Eady said, and clinked Klay’s glass. “Where was I?”

  “Hitler,” Klay said.

  Eady put his nose in his glass and inhaled his whiskey before resuming. “Hitler took the American eugenics effort further in every way, of course. Crucially, he extended his theories on the Aryan individual to the state. Germany made ill by her ‘lesser races.’ Jews, a disease; gypsies, an infestation. He used language to justify his savagery. It wasn’t murder, it was cleansing. Immigrants weren’t human beings, they were invasive species. Words made all the difference. Which is where we came in.

  “The Sovereign had been reporting favorably on the American eugenics movement. ‘Why should Hereford bulls and Rhode Island Reds benefit more from selective breeding than we humans?’—that kind of thing. Then an American intelligence officer discovered a reference to The Sovereign in a German eugenics journal. The Nazis’ top scientists were reading us.

  “That’s when Bill Donovan came to us with a special request. You recognize that name?”

  “Father of the CIA. They called him Wild Bill.”

  “Donovan’s request was simple: double down. We agreed. We ran a feature on European architecture, praising Berlin. We followed up with a piece celebrating Germany’s youth movement, those flaxen-haired scouts charging up the Zugspitze in short pants and brown shirts.” Eady sipped his whiskey. “Mind you”—Eady took a square of cheese with a toothpick—“all along the Allies are using our maps to fight the war. We printed half a million for the War Department. Every soldier carried a map with our emblem on it. The Nazis considered it a victory to have the same Sovereign writing such positive things about their country. Goebbels especially loved it, praised The Sovereign publicly. That is when we dropped our bomb.”

  Eady opened a drawer, withdrew a magazine wrapped in cellophane, and handed it to Klay. The date on the cover was March 1942. It was the old format. No glossy cover photograph, just a silver atlas on a blue background in the upper left corner, and below it a table of contents. Eady pointed to an article halfway down the list. Klay read the title aloud, “‘Fallacies in Racial Hygiene.’”

  Eady nodded. “In-house our people called it ‘Operation Aryan Error.’” He tapped the cover with his finger. “We said German scientists were engaged in a massive cover-up. They knew their Übermenschen theory was poppycock but feared revealing it. Denial played. The important thing was Hitler’s people had to eat crow one way or the other.

  “Not a game changer, but a game influencer,” Eady continued, returning the magazine to its drawer. “And I can te
ll you, Tom, that over the years, over the decades, of reporting hard facts, we have made a difference.”

  Eady placed a square of smoked Gouda on a cracker and offered it to Klay. “You’ll be able to do what I did. Get those stories no one in the world is able to get. Prizewinning, world-altering stories because you’ll have the Agency’s reach and resources.” Eady ticked off his long fingers: “Contacts. Intelligence. Access. Technology.”

  Growing up in a funeral home, Klay had learned early and better than most how to read behind people’s eyes and words.

  “Let me think about it, Vance,” he said, turning to wash his hands in Eady’s sink. He had a lot on his mind, he said. It wasn’t the slight off note he detected beneath Eady’s CIA sales pitch that caused him to pause. Nor was it journalistic ethics.

  It was more personal. The FBI had worked its way into Klay Funeral Home, that undercover agent pretending to be an embalmer, standing shoulder to shoulder in the morgue with a teenaged Klay, building his case. “Uncle Patrick,” Klay had called him. Until his father’s criminal RICO trial when “Uncle Patrick” took the witness stand and announced his real name and occupation: “Patrick Mulvaney, Special Agent, Organized Crime Squad, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Klay had a rule about law enforcement after that: fuck ’em. Didn’t matter the agency, or the country. The CIA might not technically be law enforcement, but it was pretty damn close.

  * * *

  • • •

  He found his answer to Eady hidden under the carpet of his new home, the redbrick Edwardian townhouse in the Eastern Market section of Capitol Hill. Erin was out of town for the signing, so he left the Prudential office, walked two blocks north, opened the door, and got to work. They had chosen the house for its gourmet kitchen, but the rest of the house needed work. The first thing he and Erin intended to do was to get rid of the ugly brown wall-to-wall carpeting.

  He set his backpack down on the vestibule’s slate floor, lifted a corner of the carpet, and pulled. He proceeded down the hallway, pulling up carpet as he went, until he reached the fancy kitchen’s pale gray tile. He turned and continued into the dining room, then the living room. He pulled up brown carpet as he climbed the stairs, ripped and tore brown carpet from the guest room floor. He pulled his way along the upstairs hallway to the doorway of the master bedroom, which alone in the house had its original pine wood flooring exposed.