In the Company of Killers Read online

  But Hungry lived in Pretoria. “Geographically challenged” was how they explained their eventual breakup to friends and family. Anyone who knew them could have offered a hundred other reasons why they hadn’t worked out: Hungry was too dedicated to her career as a prosecutor; Klay was too dedicated to his as a journalist. One was steady; the other transient. One black; the other white. One outgoing; the other quiet. One upbeat; the other, well, Tom Klay.

  The truth was their many differences had made Klay love Hungry even more. And he was pretty certain the same had been true for her. When Hungry discovered the walls he had built inside of himself, walls Erin, despite valiant efforts, had been unable to break down, Hungry had not given up. She had picked up a hammer and chiseled away at those barriers, working patiently. And she had been successful in ways no woman ever had.

  He told her about the Jakarta car accident—all of it—and how it made him feel. He told her about his childhood, his parents, and the loss that had laced his adulthood with despair. He told her about his fear that no matter how hard he tried, the world would simply absorb his efforts and get worse. He told her he wasn’t a good person; he was a bad person who did good things to hide the truth. He was afraid, deep down, that he liked to hurt people. Feelings he didn’t know he had. Fears he had never shared.

  But then, on the verge of what felt like true intimacy, he would pick up his duffel bag and leave. Erin thought he was repeating his same sins. She encouraged him to try again. “This woman is good for you, Tom,” she said. “Go back.”

  Hungry was good for him. She knew how to love and be loved. She was willing to go more than halfway in their relationship. She understood him, and loved him anyway. “Don’t you see?” Hungry said to him. “You never take a case you won’t win. I am that case, Thomas. Your unwinnable case. You have to commit to love, and risk losing it, to find happiness.”

  Commitment wasn’t the issue—he wanted a relationship with Hungry—but he had made another commitment years ago, and that commitment left no space for her. And so he would disappear again, and months would pass before his heart drove him back to South Africa. And when he returned their cycle would begin again: she chiseling away, he pretending he was an honest man struggling to make a happy life together.

  But he was not an honest man.

  * * *

  • • •

  The DC lunch crowd was heading back to their offices when Klay stepped out of his taxi in front of The Sovereign’s headquarters. Klay looked up at the wedge-shaped brick building and felt a twinge of pride. The Sovereign was about to celebrate its 150th anniversary. In a world of media bankruptcies, buyouts, mergers, and takeovers, The Sovereign had endured, protected against time by a gift from a railroad baron named Hiram Prendergast, and his cousin, a botany-loving inventor named Thomas Edison, who together had endowed the nonprofit institution in perpetuity. For the next 141 years, including the moment Klay stepped onto the sidewalk, a Prendergast had controlled The Sovereign.

  Meanwhile the Sovereign Society had evolved from a producer of survey maps and expedition journals into the most widely recognized science-and-exploration media platform in the world—producer of four glossy magazines, two television channels, an Oscar-winning documentary film studio, a research institution, a website, travel services, licensed adventure products, and the planet’s most viewed social media. All of it collectively known as The Sovereign, voted the world’s most trusted media brand.

  Klay climbed the marble steps. He walked rapidly, with his head down, shoulders stiff and rolled forward, as if he were wading into a brawl. He winced as he pushed the building’s heavy revolving door.

  “Hi, Tonya,” he said to the guard behind her desk.

  “Good afternoon, Tom. I’m glad you’re home safe,” she said, looking at his sling. “Mr. Eady?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Klay entered a small, oak-paneled elevator set slightly apart from the building’s four main lifts and pressed its only button. After a slow, rumbling ascent, Klay stepped off the elevator into a modern gallery of photographic images and exhibits arranged in a labyrinth. The photographs were eight feet tall and suspended from the ceiling on black wires. Several had been taken by Eady himself back when he was a staff photographer. Ahead Howard Carter stepped forward into Tutankhamen’s funerary chamber. A left turn and Dian Fossey bottle-fed a baby mountain gorilla at Karisoke. A right turn introduced Tsavo’s red elephants. In the labyrinth’s center squatted an original bathysphere, that one-eyed Volkswagen-on-a-rope that Beebe and Barton rode deeper into the ocean than any human had gone before.

  Officially, the maze was designed to force visitors to reflect on their place in history and the potential each of us has to be an explorer. But Klay knew better. The top floor of The Sovereign was Vance Eady’s aerie. The labyrinth existed to remind people just who they were about to meet.

  Eady stood in his secretary’s doorway, hands on hips, dressed as always—dark wool slacks, V-neck sweater over a white shirt, shined John Lobb shoes—like an Anglican minister relaxing between sermons on a perpetually autumn day. “Well,” the Society’s president and magazine’s editor in chief said as Klay approached. “That’s fine. Very fine, indeed. Welcome home.” He patted Klay’s shoulder gently and ushered him toward his office.

  “Hello, Sally,” Klay said, nodding to Eady’s secretary as they passed.

  The Sovereign’s beloved caretaker shook her gray head. “You boys,” she scolded. “Welcome home, Tom.”

  “Hold my calls please, Sally,” Eady said. He led Klay into his office and closed the door. “I’m paying for a party at your place, aren’t I?” Eady said, and without waiting for Klay’s reply, asked, “Drink?”

  Klay nodded. He tossed a Mongolian eagle hunter’s cap out of his way and took a seat on Eady’s worn leather sofa.

  Eady crossed to a large standing globe beside his Resolute desk, split the globe in half, and withdrew two crystal whiskey glasses and a bottle of scotch, while Klay absently read for the hundredth time the lines from Kipling framed on the end table beside him.

  NOW this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky,

  And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.

  As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back;

  For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack . . .

  Eady was indeed leader of a pack of journalists, photographers, and explorers who circled the world and brought their discoveries home. Every wall and flat surface in Eady’s office held some exotic treasure of Sovereign men and women returned: A blue-green dinosaur egg fossil, five curare-tipped poison darts in a jaguar-skin quiver. Unidentified teeth, disconnected bones, pieces of gnarled fur. A stuffed zebra head hung opposite Klay with its Well, what’s your excuse? expression. Next to the Kipling, a gold-ringed Kayan necklace had been turned into a table lamp. On one corner of Eady’s desk, an inverted hawksbill sea turtle shell held Eady’s car keys.

  Klay’s gift to Eady hung on the wall behind the old man’s desk, a wooden loom strung with Indonesian double ikat cloth, purchased for Eady the day before Klay struck the boy. On receiving it, Eady quoted Henry Ward Beecher. “‘. . . the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up tomorrow . . .’”

  It took Klay a few years to find his place at The Sovereign. He had thick wrists and fingers too broad for the Macs the staff used, so they bought him a PC and somebody dug up an old IBM keyboard from the basement as a joke, but the older design turned out to be easier for him to use, and the joke was on his colleagues. The keyboard clacked so loudly anyone on the east end of the third floor knew when he had an idea. He ignored the company dress code. Maybe it was the suits he’d worn as a boy, or the images of the bodies he’d dressed, but he couldn’t bring himself to wear khakis or a dress
shirt. He dressed the way he did in the field.

  No one asked him about his past directly. They scattered hints. “Did you see the piece 60 did on the Russian mafia last night?” Porfle might ask. Klay said no, whether he had or not. He didn’t share his personal story with anyone. They knew his name, where he’d grown up. They had Google.

  “So where’d you study journalism?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “So where’d you learn to write?”

  “My mother,” he answered, which was the truth.

  Much of who he was came from her. She read to him every night as a boy. Whitman and Frost and guileless Mary Oliver. “Tell me,” Oliver asked years after his mother was gone, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” When he first read the line it was his mother’s voice he heard asking the question. His first writing was poems he composed for her. He had a gift, she said, smiling at the images he created with his pencil. “Words don’t have to flow in order,” she encouraged. “Your life doesn’t, either.” If he didn’t want to follow in the family business, he was free to leave it. His father agreed, she said.

  He wasn’t about to share any of that with his colleagues any more than he would reveal that he still wrote a poem a week in the Moleskine notebook he carried in his shirt pocket, something she taught him to do. His silent prayer to her.

  With little to go on, his coworkers crafted their own narrative to explain Tom Klay. Some called him Eady’s pet. They wove a story together from his muttering, his clothes, his family’s business, his interest in crime. An incident in Mexico City provided his weavers a prominent thread. Klay had turned a corner and discovered his photographer pushed up against a wall by a police officer who wanted to impose a tax on the American with the big camera. Klay had walked toward the cop, his hands held in front of his chest with the palms facing out, patting the air, gently saying, “We are on an assignment for your president.” The officer pulled his Glock .45 and pointed it at Klay’s head. In a single motion, Klay snatched the pistol, ejected the clip, jacked the slide, depressed the slide lock, and with a twist of his wrist reduced the weapon to a pipe, a spring, and a piece of black plastic. “He’s with me,” Klay said, and handed the cop his deconstructed gun.

  The photographer had ended his tale on that “He’s with me” line, cementing Klay’s reputation throughout the building, turning half of the staff into open admirers, but more than a few the other way.

  Eady could have corrected the rumors, could have ensured that Klay’s reputation stayed within certain boundaries. But he hadn’t, and that told Klay a good deal about who Vance Eady was, too.

  Eady handed him his scotch and took a seat in a wingback chair, crossing one leg over his other knee. Eady reminded Klay of his grandfather. He had the same full white head of hair parted straight as a rifle barrel, same blue eyes and strong jaw. Even the same leathery neck skin with crosshatching that, in Klay’s grandfather, had fascinated Klay as a child. Physically, the main difference between the two men was in their smile. When he was amused, his grandfather had broken into a broad, chipped-tooth grin. Eady’s smile was always controlled. Even when he was pleased, Eady’s mouth barely opened.

  “You look like death itself, Tom,” Eady said.

  “I’ve been better.” Klay shifted his position, trying to get comfortable.

  Eady shook his head. “It’s good to have you home.” He raised his glass. “To Ellsworth.”

  Ellsworth, Klay thought.

  Porfle had his sniper-spotter fantasy, and Eady had his Ellsworth. Every year, during a cocktail reception for incoming journalists, Eady stood on the roof of The Sovereign and gave a toast to Elmer Ellsworth, the young Union colonel who crossed the Potomac to Alexandria, Virginia, cut down a confederate flag for the president, and was promptly shot dead with the rebel banner in his arms—making him the first casualty of the Civil War. “Remember Ellsworth!” became a Union rallying cry.

  “For a scrap of cloth,” Eady liked to say, lifting his glass, “that wasn’t.” The implication as subtle as a cannon ball: Bring me back stories. Survive if you can. I am your Lincoln.

  “To Bernard,” Klay countered quietly, and drained his glass.

  “Any more on the shooter, or shooters?”

  Klay studied Eady, surprised. “I was hoping you might help with that.”

  Eady nodded, sipped his drink. “Botha’s gone quiet?”

  “Why would he do the politician?” Klay said.

  Eady gestured for Klay to repeat his question.

  “Why kill Lekorere?” Klay asked. “He wasn’t a threat.”

  Eady shrugged. “Wrong place, wrong time. Shooters took your vehicle to get away. For some reason Lekorere was in it. That was a mistake.” Eady repeated his question. “Have you heard more on Botha?”

  Klay’s mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about Bernard on his hands and knees outside his mother’s hut searching for his rungu. Klay teasing him for losing his club again. “You should put a string on it.” Bernard smiling his joy-filled smile, leading Klay on a hike, his gold belt jingling. “This blue flower tells us rain is coming. This is the candelabra tree. The sap will blind you. The only cure is to wash your eye out with blood.” Klay, bandaged, standing beside Bernard’s mother as she poured milk on her son’s grave.

  “Tom?”

  “I don’t know, Vance,” Klay said. “He texted me while I was in the hospital.”

  “Texted you?”

  Klay nodded. “‘Hope your food’s worse than mine,’ it said. ‘Get well soon. Hahaha.’”

  “‘Hahaha,’” Eady echoed, looking quizzically at Klay. “How do you know it was Botha?”

  “I don’t know it. But he signed it. ‘Ras Botha.’”

  Eady shook his head. “The Octopus, you called him, right? He’s a murderer, Tom. We knew that before, but now you know it firsthand. That changes things, I’d say.”

  “There was something else on that plateau,” Klay said. “Something just before the shot . . .”

  “I know. Bernard. Pity. But you’re a hero, Tom. Your actions saved the rest of—”

  “No, something else. It’s on the edge of my memory. I can’t quite get it.”

  “Something else?” Eady looked at Klay thoughtfully for a moment. He seemed to decide something, then got to his feet and began to pace. “Good. Keep at it. Though it might not be a memory at all. Had a gorilla subadult hit me on the head once. Just a punch right on top here—” He poked a finger into his white hair. “Woke up thinking the old man had popped me for playing hooky from Exeter. Saw the whole thing down to the shine on his wingtips. Called for my mother, only mother wintered in Palm Beach and I wasn’t sixteen anymore. You never know. Memory is a tricky thing.” He turned to Klay. “If you think of anything, any clue at all, let me know. We want to get the bastard. By that I don’t just mean me. The public has an interest.”

  The public has an interest.

  Klay looked at Eady. It had been a while since Eady had used that particular phrase. Klay felt a sharp pain run down his injured arm.

  ASSIGNMENT

  Washington, DC

  Klay was sitting on his usual stool at the end of the Gray Pigeon’s dimly lit bar with a laptop open in front of him, thinking. Eady had gone quiet. He’d seen the old man three, maybe four times since Kenya, and each time Eady had somewhere else to be, something more important on his mind. Klay sipped his drink. Maybe he was making too much of things, overthinking it. It’s why he was here, wasn’t it, watching Billy Thurman stack glasses behind a bar on a Saturday morning with a bourbon in front of him? For the thinking.

  “You mind if I switch to the game?” Billy asked.

  Klay didn’t have to ask the bar’s owner which game he was referring to. Any other day Billy wore a black T-shirt and jeans, his smoker-veined arms and faded tattoos exposed. But today he had on a b
lue sweatshirt, sleeves pushed to the elbow, and the word “Navy” emblazoned across his chest in gold. It was eleven o’clock. Except for Phil the Economist, perched on his regular stool, the Pigeon was empty.

  Empty. Like his list of ideas on how to take down Ras Botha. That’s what he should have been focused on. Klay raised two fingers off his glass signaling Billy to do as he pleased. Billy looked up at the television, a box the size of a small refrigerator bolted to the ceiling, and flipped channels with a remote.

  The Gray Pigeon was what used to be called a reporter’s bar, a Pennsylvania Avenue watering hole where veteran journalists and their powerful subjects could mingle after work and off the record. Photos in black metal frames memorialized the Pigeon’s glory days: David Halberstam at his word processor. Sy Hersh on the telephone. Molly Ivins sporting John Tower’s Stetson. Helen Thomas wagging a finger at Marlin Fitzwater. Even Washington Star columnist Mary “Fawn not upon the great” McGrory had allowed her photo to be taken at the Pigeon, albeit walking out of the place. Klay avoided sitting across from a framed note, typed on FBI stationery, which hung behind the bar. The note read, “Jack Anderson: Lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures.—J. Edgar Hoover.” Both Hoover and Anderson had autographed the yellowing note in ink that was now faded.

  The Gray Pigeon had faded, too. The internet, Craigslist, and—Billy’s pet theory—Jim Fixx’s Complete Book of Running—had each taken a turn knocking the wind out of smoke-filled evenings downing dry martinis and pickled eggs. In a corner sat Billy’s one effort to keep up with the times: a piña colada machine that looped a warm mint-green liquid.

  “It’s just the march on yet,” Billy said, backing away from the television set. “Then they got the tailgate. Kickoff’s at three.” He set the remote down next to the cash register and refilled Klay’s ice water. “What’s next on your agenda?”