Kill and Be Killed

by Louis Begley

  In the morning it rained heavily, water coming down straight as it often does in the Venice Lagoon. I stayed in my room after breakfast and opened my laptop. Habit is a powerful force. It overcame my misery. I wrote steadily until almost one and found I had produced my normal quota of thirteen-hundred-andsome usable words. Feeling that I needed a drink, I went down to the combination bar and restaurant, got the bartender to make me a dry gin martini, and had lunch. I lingered and was having my third espresso when the chambermaid brought me a letter addressed in typed capital letters to Jack Dana. It had been posted on Saturday in Venice. Inside was a sheet of white paper in the center of which was a large black spot. No writing, just that spot. Someone has been reading Treasure Island, I said to myself, and knows that I will know the meaning of this sign. It was a disturbing thought, especially since the message came from Venice, where my only friends and acquaintances were a New York plastic surgeon and his wife, who had a house on the Dorsoduro but had left for New York some ten days earlier, an Italian winemaker and his French wife, both of whom I considered particularly well disposed toward me, a restaurant owner called Signor Ernesto, who served the best hamburger in the world in his tiny establishment on the Calle degli Assassini, and the people at a gym in Dorsoduro, where I went two or three times a week to work with a trainer astonishingly like my New York trainer, Wolf. We did kickboxing and some Krav Maga together, and he’d brought me to a level that he thought qualified me to become an instructor. It was inconceivable that any of them would have played this tasteless joke. I really could think of no other Venetians who knew both my name and my address on Torcello. That left, of course, the possibility that the black spot had been sent by the manager of the locanda or someone on his staff, but I was a generous tipper, made no trouble, and saw no reason to doubt that my relations with them all were pleasant and amicable. I folded the sheet and put it back in the envelope, taking care not to rub off such fingerprints as there might be. We would see what happened next.

  When I went back to my room for the nap that was to precede another work session—since it was too wet to go out, I thought I might as well push ahead—I first read the online edition of the Times. Just as Simon had predicted, I found a small news item about Kerry. It gave less detail than Simon’s account but had the effect on me of a punch to the gut.

  I found, however, that I could neither sleep nor work. The rain having turned into a drizzle, I put on my running shoes and clothes and set out on the daily run I’d skipped that morning. Five miles, which on that small island required inventive itineraries and a lot of cross-country running. I especially valued the latter. Once you’ve been a U.S. Marine Force Recon officer you want to stay as close to fighting trim as possible short of returning to active service, which was a move I hadn’t contemplated and one that was in any event foreclosed by my injuries. I came back sad but able to work and wrote until nearly half past nine, which gave me just enough time to shower and dress and order my dinner before the kitchen closed.

  The next day, Tuesday, the sky was of the clearest blue. Since I had produced twice my daily quota the day before, I shortened my morning writing time, took the vaporetto to Venice, and had lunch at Signor Ernesto’s. He was full of concern about the Hilton Molino Stucky, a three-hundred-seventy-plus-room hotel that had risen on the Giudecca out of the shell of a long-abandoned but gorgeous flour mill. How many more tourists can we accommodate during the high season? he moaned. Or the ships that will bring them? No respectable business needs them! It was very clear that he did not. His restaurant was full of locals from the Fenice neighborhood—antique-shop owners, real estate and insurance agents, the neighborhood pharmacist, and a couple of lawyers, all of them men wearing suits and neckties—and one or two well-behaved foreigners like me. Ernesto had a gift for inclusion and exclusion. If he liked the cut of your jib, he would rearrange the ingeniously crafted tables so as to be able to seat you. If he didn’t, every empty table was reserved. Sorry, I can’t help you. Non c’è niente da fare. Ernesto came over to my table, as he often did, ready to talk about American politics. I invited him to sit down and poured him a glass of the excellent wine he’d recommended. Un vino stupendo, he had said, stupendo, and, as always, it deserved the praise. After I’d explained in my usual mix of Italian and English the operation of the debt ceiling and the need for Congress to raise it, and he’d shaken his head once more in disbelief, I asked him just what kind of person—I made clear that I was speaking about Venetians—would, in his opinion, be apt to send me by mail to my locanda on Torcello a threatening message. Some anti-American nut, right or left wing? A waiter who thought I hadn’t tipped him adequately? I added I was pretty sure that as a rule I overtipped. A practical joker? Ernesto shook his head and said it was impossible. You’re a gentleman, he said, who is liked and respected here. Anyway, stupid messages aren’t a Venetian trick.

  —

  The weather continued to be beautiful. On Thursday, I had lunch again in the garden of my locanda. Sorrow for Kerry had become a constant ache that kept me company from the moment I woke to when I finally fell asleep. It visited me in my dreams, resembling most nearly the dull pain—seven on a scale from one to ten, I would estimate for the pain-management specialist—that plagued me for months after Walter Reed surgeons had repaired my pelvis. I knew the hurt and had carried on with occasional help from Percocet, and I carried on now on Torcello, working steadily, taking my noonday meals in the garden if the sun shone as it did the next day, Friday, exactly one week after Kerry died, plotting in my head the structure of the next chapter. The great difference was that there were no remedies for the present ache and that, deep inside, I didn’t wish for relief, lest it signal the slackening of my love.

  I finished my half bottle of wine and may have been about to doze off at table—something that occasionally happened to me—when the chambermaid’s Scusi, signore roused me. She had brought a letter. Like the first, it was addressed to me in solid capital letters and was postmarked Venice with the previous day’s date. I slit the envelope with great care and extracted the single sheet it contained. But this time, instead of the black spot, there was an explicit though brief verbal message written out also in solid capital letters: YOU’RE NEXT, FUCKHEAD! I took a deep breath, attracted the attention of the waiter lounging against the balustrade of the veranda, and asked him for an espresso chiuso, as concentrated as possible, and a glass of an old Barolo grappa. The identity of the scribe who had set down those words on paper was of secondary interest to me. That the diction was Abner Brown’s, I had no doubt. He had dictated them. The thought and the intention were equally familiar. He had tried to have me killed after I discovered that my uncle’s suicide was in fact murder, that he had been forced to hang himself by a hit man Brown had sent, a Serb by the name of Slobodan Milić. I killed the Serb, and when I taunted Brown, giving him the news over the telephone, he called me a fuckhead—apparently a term of endearment in Abnerspeak—and gave me the long version of the threat I’d just received. I’ll get you, he’d yelled. 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 new element was my being “next.” So someone had already been hunted down. I didn’t think he meant Harry. For Abner that would be ancient history. The quarry he referred to was clearly Kerry, Harry’s most trusted lieutenant, who had learned from Harry most of what he had discovered about the fraud and criminality that pervaded Abner Brown’s businesses to the point of being inseparable from them. Harry died because Abner feared that he would expose him. Kerry would have died because she knew too much, and because Abner had probably found out, through moles at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York or Houston, the FBI, or the Justice Department, that she had interpreted for our government the road map of Abner’s criminal empire that Harry had prepared and that I had found after he died. The question to which I had no answer was, Why hadn’t Kerry been murdered sooner? Why had he let her live more than a year after the road ma
p was delivered to the authorities? Because I was now convinced that, whether or not Kerry had been snorting cocaine or downing Mollies or other junk, the overdose that killed her wasn’t an accident or a suicide. She had been assassinated on Abner’s order, just like Harry. If the past was a guide, the threat that I’d be next was not to be taken lightly. I’d left my Marine Corps sidearm, a Colt 1911, in the safe at my apartment in New York. But I’d brought with me, in the suitcase I checked when I took the plane for Venice, the razor-sharp switchblade I took off the mullah I killed with my father’s Ka-Bar knife in the barracks in Helmand, putting it right through his neck when I saw the bastard start to pull the pin of a grenade. I went upstairs to check. The suitcase was under my bed. I got it out. The knife was exactly where I’d left it. I put it in the pocket of my jacket and resolved to keep it within reach night and day until I took the plane home. There was a new and urgent reason for going back to New York.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon on Torcello, nine in the morning on the East Coast of the United States. I called the number of Scott Prentice’s office cell phone. He answered at once and, after we had exchanged brief, affectionate greetings, said he’d been meaning to call me about Kerry but hadn’t had the heart to do it.

  You must feel sick, he told me. When I read about her in the Times online last Monday I thought someone had hit me with a two-by-four.

  I did, I said, and I do. I had meant to go home the next day and planned to surprise you and Susie by showing up in Alexandria unannounced, but after I’d heard about Kerry from Simon Lathrop—he called on Sunday—I just couldn’t. I canceled the flight I’d booked and made no other plan. I just stayed and worked.

  Then I went on to tell him about the black spot and the message I’d just received.

  It’s got to be Abner, I said. Abner who decided she had to go, and now has me again in his sights. But I don’t understand the timing. What set him off, after all those months? It’s got to be linked to something going on in the cases against his companies.

  Possibly, Scott replied. I haven’t kept up with them the way I should have. Another reason might be that he thought he should lie low after Slobo.

  I told him I didn’t think going to ground was Abner’s style.

  Just look at him, I continued, more than a year has passed since we went to the U.S. attorney and to you guys with the Rosetta stone that basically cracked open his schemes, and he’s still sitting pretty. In fact, he’s building a state within a state in the U.S., with his super PACs and the river of contributions he directs to every right-wing project, no matter how crazy. I bet you the guy thinks he’s so far above the law that none of you can touch him. Something special must be involved.

  When will you get back? Scott asked.

  I doubt I can manage it tomorrow, but surely within the next three or four days.

  Come to see us as soon as you can, and keep me posted. Meanwhile I’ll poke around and learn what can be learned. And send me by FedEx those messages. Probably they’ve been scrubbed of anything that might be a clue, but one never knows. I’d like to have them examined very closely.

  I told Scott I’d do exactly that.

  II

  I said goodbye to Scott, took a deep breath, and went about organizing my departure. But not without first having a drink. I went down to the reception desk, asked the concierge to see whether I could have a business-class seat the following Tuesday on Alitalia’s nonstop flight to JFK, and told him he’d find me at the bar. He appeared in no time at all to say that a seat was available. I asked him to reserve it and tell bookkeeping the date of my departure. I glanced at my watch. Four-thirty. Too late for serious work. At best, I could revise the morning’s and the preceding day’s production. I asked the barista for an espresso and a Barolo grappa and thought about the time I had left in Venice. I would spend some hours at the Accademia and make my way from there on foot to the Gesuiti for another long look at Titian’s Saint Lawrence on the Grill. The walk was a long one. If there was time left after the visit, I’d take the vaporetto back to the Accademia, get in a session at the gym, say ciao to my trainer Fabrizio, and encourage him once more to give me a ring if he really came to New York in the spring. I’d also give him a present. Two hundred euros seemed about right. At some point, I must revisit the Frari basilica and feast my eyes on its great Titians—the Assumption altarpiece and the Pesaro family Madonna. And I would take leave of the aristocratic winemaker and his wife, if they were in Venice, and of course Signor Ernesto. None of this was really necessary—I could write to the Contarinis and to Ernesto and tell them I had been unexpectedly summoned to New York, and I could mail my present to Fabrizio—and I began to ask myself whether it wouldn’t be smarter to get a flight tomorrow, even if it meant changing planes in Paris, Frankfurt, or London. The jobs that lay ahead were to find whoever had killed Kerry and kill him and to bring to a conclusion my unfinished business with Abner Brown. I knew I couldn’t and wouldn’t shirk them. And yet I made no move to accelerate my departure. A mixture of inertia, nostalgia, and foreboding held me back. Torcello and Venice had been good to me. I wanted a few days’ reprieve.

  Next morning I was up at a quarter of six as usual for my daily run, put on my running clothes, and slipped the switchblade and my iPhone into the pocket of my windbreaker. First I ran to the vaporetto landing, then all the way back to the basilica. Once there, I doubled back to Fondamenta dei Borgognoni and followed Sentiero Casa Andrich to its end. From there I ran south, in the general direction of Burano, keeping on my right first the uninhabited Isola dei Laghi and then Isola Mazzorbo, once a refuge from barbarian invasions, now better known for the artichokes grown on it. The stretch of dune grass and dwarf thyme and laurel that lay inland to my left was trackless. It was there that I habitually switched to a fartlek run, alternating sprints with jogging, doing squats and push-ups and jumping jacks, and adding exercises of my own invention useful for taking evasive action in an exposed terrain. I’d keep a low profile as I ran, dropping down to the ground at irregular intervals, zigzagging, and crawling. The routine was hell on my running suits, but I was sick of fatigues and anyway didn’t want to acquire the reputation as a total weirdo. That concern was surely misplaced. No one was around on that part of the island at my chosen hours, and the few locals who lived on Torcello had long ago become used to foreigners’ oddities.

  I was about fifty yards from the shoreline, and nearing the southern tip of Torcello, when I saw out of the corner of my eye, as I got up from a crawl, a man in a ski mask rising from behind a duck blind. He held a crossbow and aimed it at me. I hit the deck not a second too soon. An arrow whizzed just above me. I waited a minute or so and showed enough of myself to offer a target—assuming the man was content to wound me. Another arrow. We played that game until he had shot ten arrows. It was time for a test. Gingerly, I raised myself to my knees. Nothing. Tough shit, kiddo, I muttered, no more arrows in your quiver. It’s time to have fun. I stood up and gave him the finger. Not being sure how widely recognized it was in Italy, I followed up with the bras d’honneur together with the Bronx cheer. The guy seemed to be ready to play, running toward me at full speed. He’d left the crossbow behind. Instead, in his right hand he held a hunting dagger. I waited in a crouch, switchblade closed but in the palm of my right hand.

  He didn’t like that. Big surprise. Hadn’t his bosses told him anything about me? My trainer Fabrizio had been teaching me the grossest insults in Venetian dialect. Otherwise, I might have missed out on the meaning of the beauties he let go with when he saw I was going to fight. As it was I caught the gist of at least two: Va in cùeo da to mare and Ma ti gà emoròidi in testa? Roughly: Sodomize your mother and Have you hemorrhoids on your brain? Same to you, I cried and, in that sort of eerie quiet that descends when you’re in mortal danger—sharpening your sense of humor—I made a mental note to tell Abner to clean up his own and his killers’ language. It was time to get to business. The guy was shifting his dagger from hand
to hand, which is standard in a knife fight, and doing a little jig meant to distract me. Then he lunged, the dagger in his right hand, going for my neck. It was a dumb move, one I had parried a hundred times in my Krav Maga sessions. I ducked under the thrust, grabbed his arm, twisted it to the point of breaking. With his other hand he went for my eyes, but it was too late. I’d opened the switchblade during his cute little dance. It was a pleasure to hear him howl as I sliced his belly open. He was wearing a sweatsuit, which gave no resistance. The guts spilled out. You don’t die immediately of a stomach wound, and he continued to writhe and howl. It got on my nerves. If I’d had a gun I would have put a bullet through his head. I did the next best thing: I slit his throat.

  I caught my breath when the noise stopped. In comparison with Slobo, the killer of my uncle Harry, Harry’s cat, and Harry’s secretary, who had tried to add me as well to his trophies, this guy wasn’t ready for prime time. I wondered who he was and pulled off his ski mask. He was much younger, blond, and, unlike Slobo, had an unscarred and handsome face. Judging by his look, he too could be a Serb or Croat, but in that case why that flow of Venetian dialect filth? Perhaps that was what he’d learned first. To make sure he was good and dead I kicked him. Nothing doing. OK to search him. As I’d expected, there was nothing in his pockets, except a five-hundred-euro bill—his carfare, I snickered—and nothing in his shoes. With my cell phone, I took several photos of him, then cut a square of cloth from his sweatpants and carefully put the euros on it. On second thought, I reached for his hand, cut off his index finger, and put it also on the cloth. Tying the four corners, I made a neat bundle. Perfect material for fingerprints and DNA, I congratulated myself. As I’d also expected, there was a dinghy with an outboard motor at anchor in the narrow arm of the lagoon that separates Torcello at that point from Mazzorbo. I dragged the body over to the dinghy. My initial idea was to load the body into it and give it a good shove in the direction of Burano. I decided against doing that. It was the sort of thing that could set off a big police search for the killer. Instead, I raised the dinghy’s anchor, cut the line that attached it, and wrapped the part tied to the anchor around the guy’s neck, leaving less than a foot between the two. That done, I pushed the body into the water—R.I.P., kiddo!—and carried out the second part of the discarded plan. I sent the dinghy to make its way through the lagoon. The crossbow was easy to find. I threw it into the water. It was a metal job, heavier than I’d expected, and sank. I would have liked to get rid of the arrows as well, but was it worth the trouble? I didn’t think so.