Kill and Be Killed

by Louis Begley

  I thanked him and reminded him about Kerry’s file that was in Heidi’s possession and told him about my discovery of Kerry’s other file in my text email account and, to the extent I could, described what the file contained.

  I should tell you, I continued, that Kerry clearly thought that the material in the file she sent to me was covered by the attorney-client privilege. Probably she thought the same was true of what she sent to Heidi Krohn. Nevertheless, she’d decided that she was taking all those files with her to Alexandria in order to deliver them to the grand jury. I’ve determined that I’m going to give that file, which I now have in my possession, as well as Heidi’s file—she’s completely on board with that—to Ed Flanagan. I thought I should tell you that. I realize it creates a problem for Jones & Whetstone, but I believe it can’t be helped. Abner Brown belongs behind bars for life. For many lives, if only that were possible!

  Simon covered his face with his hands and was silent for a long moment. When he spoke he said, Yes, it will be a problem for the firm. Incidentally, I think it’s not just a matter of attorney-client privilege, which was an issue when you took Harry’s road map to Flanagan. This time, Kerry appears to have stolen law-firm property. The poor thing is dead, so that’s probably irrelevant. Certainly the firm can have no recourse against her. But there is a different and serious problem. Could the firm have criminal liability by reason of having constructive—or perhaps actual—knowledge of what Abner was doing? Part of me wants to examine your and Heidi’s files. The part of me that’s like an ostrich and wants to stick its head in the sand says: Leave it alone. If there’s a living culprit it’s our disgraced former presiding partner, Hobson. He’s in Houston, and if they go after him, so much the better. If poor Harry was in some way culpable, he’s in a place Flanagan and his colleagues can’t reach him. So I think the ostriches have it! I don’t want to look at your files.

  Thank you! The last thing I want, I told him, is to cause trouble for you or more pain. But I do need your help. I want to confront Abner; in fact I want to show him the goods we have on him. I’d like to time it so that we see each other the day before I’m scheduled to meet with Flanagan. Of course, I’d make sure that the files will get to Flanagan on the appointed day whatever happens to me. If possible, I’d like to see Abner in New York, perhaps when he’s here for a board meeting. Is there a way you could find out when that might be?

  Simon laughed and said, That’s easy. We’re both still on the board of the museum; in fact we’re on the executive committee. Why I haven’t strangled him at one of our sessions is a mystery. Or rather a proof of my senescence. Let’s see when we meet next.

  Simon must be one of the last men alive in the industrialized world not to keep his appointments on a computer and a smartphone. He extracted from the inside pocket of his beautifully tailored navy-blue suit coat a carmine Smythson pocket calendar, adjusted his reading glasses, and turned pages.

  You’re in luck. He chuckled. Next Wednesday morning, a week from tomorrow, executive committee, followed by a full board meeting on Thursday. He’s bound to attend and spend at least Wednesday night in the city. In fact, he might spend the weekend. Linda—that’s his wife—likes the theater.

  How convenient, I said. According to gossip columns—I’ve Googled the bastard—he lives on Fifth Avenue, right across the street from the zoo.

  Simon nodded. In an apartment full of armor! Don’t yield to temptation and beat him into a pulp with a mace!

  That will be hard to resist, I answered, but I’ll do my best.

  As we were leaving the club I told him that instead of accompanying him to his office on foot as usual, I’d have to take a cab.

  Doctor’s orders!

  God bless you, my boy, he answered. I’ll walk. If you go, as I had to, to the trouble of getting an artificial hip, you feel duty bound to use it.

  —

  What happened to Boris, to the extent we could verify it, was indeed sordid and terrifying. I am certain I was right to spare Simon the account. The leads—there were hardly any except more chatter among the masseuses at the spa where Lena had worked—about her being picked up after work or being brought to the spa occasionally by a big black-haired guy whom they thought they heard her call Boris, but to whom she never introduced them, were useless. How many big black-haired men were there in the five boroughs and the greater metropolitan area? And if you narrowed it down to the subset among them that frequented girls like Lena, where were you?

  Zilch, said Martin. The bastard’s disappeared. Gone back to Lower Slobbovia. Joined the marines. Jack, I’m genuinely sorry to be wasting your money looking for him. If he turns up, it’ll be exactly when we’re not looking for him and when we least want to find him.

  Of course he and Lee checked the morgue. Lena’s case taught them that. Nada.

  So matters stood until Sunday, two days ago. Martin called me first thing in the morning and said, Jack, I bet you haven’t read the News.

  You know I don’t read it, I answered. Why?

  Why? Listen to this. I’ll read you a short item that appeared this morning. Are you sitting down?

  MUTILATED BODY FOUND BY BIRD-WATCHERS

  Sunday, November 3, 2013. A party of bird-watchers, led by Joshua Phillips, a Columbia history professor and noted ornithologist, made a grisly discovery while hiking yesterday in the Norton Basin Natural Resource Area. Lying on its back in the immediate vicinity of multifamily homes on Bay 32nd Street, Queens, was the mutilated body of a white male. According to the Police Department’s spokesman, the body had been beheaded and the fingers of both hands had been chopped off. None of these remains could be seen in the vicinity of the body, and the spokesman speculated that they had been disposed of somewhere else. No papers of any sort were found in the corpse’s clothing. Based on the condition of the corpse, the murder occurred between four and eight weeks ago. The police are investigating.

  Holy shit! I exclaimed. Do you suppose that’s Boris? Abner’s an accurate son of a bitch. He told me, when I called him from the hospital after killing Jovan, that neither he nor anyone on earth could send Boris to me. That must be Boris. They killed him after he killed Lena, or they killed them both—perhaps the same day.

  Could be, replied Martin. We’re on our way to the morgue. That’s real cute, cutting off a guy’s fingers to get rid of his fingerprints.

  Martin has a soft side you’d never suspect, I said to myself, remembering the nameless archer on Torcello whose finger I’d cut off to send to Scott so his fingerprints could be studied. A useless undertaking, as it turned out.

  He called me late that afternoon. I’d gotten impatient, wondering what had held him up. He and Lee were together, and he had conferenced Lee in on his cell phone so they could both speak to me. The body was a horrific sight, they said, the neck severed as though with a dull saw.

  I hope they shot the guy before they did it, Lee interjected. I saw a guy decapitated in Pakistan, but never anything like this.

  I wouldn’t count on it, was Martin’s comment. They sawed the fingers too. Didn’t use a knife or a cleaver. Sawed. Fucking sadists.

  Anyway, he continued, there was a tattoo on the right forearm. A weird sort of cross—above the regular beam, you know, to which Christ’s hands were nailed, there’s another short beam parallel to it, and way under the regular beam another short beam slanting from left to right. I took a picture and I’ll send it to you.

  That’s OK, I interrupted, it’s an Orthodox cross. Used in Russia and Ukraine and all over the Balkans. Keep going, please!

  The bastards didn’t see it, Martin said, because they didn’t bother to strip the body. They missed something else that’s really weird too. The guy had a tiny letter b in Cyrillic tattooed on his prick! I know it’s a b and the morgue attendant who’s Russian confirmed it!

  Holy shit! I practically screamed into the telephone, I didn’t know you could have your prick tattooed.

  Believe me, it’s not frequent, Mart
in replied, but it does happen. This guy must have been real proud of his dick. Like his Stradivarius.

  I winced when he said that.

  Anyway, after that Lee and I got on the phone to Pablo, you know, the bartender at the club. He lives in Washington Heights. Our call woke him up. I told him I thought we’d found Boris—murdered—and would he get over to the morgue to identify him. He went into a song and dance about how he was tired and his wife would kill him if he went downtown. To make a long story short, I offered him five hundred. Jack, I hope you don’t mind?

  Good God, no!

  Well, that got him into a taxi in a flash. We waited for him outside the building and brought him in. Bingo. Same arm, same cross, he said. I saw the cross real clear at the club. Then he rushed to the toilet and vomited.

  You and Lee certainly have the run of the morgue, I said stupidly.

  Captain Jack—Martin laughed—Lee and I combined have fifty-plus years in the Bureau. If that didn’t give us an entrée or two, there’d be something seriously wrong. All kidding aside, I think we’ve got what’s left of Boris. We’ll never be able to prove it forensically, of course, unless his DNA’s in the database. The chances of that aren’t high.

  The news that Boris—or the man we called by the name, who I had no doubt killed Kerry—was now most probably dead too, murdered, I had to believe, by Abner’s thugs, left me speechless and drained. I couldn’t rejoice; I couldn’t even bring myself to say anything grotesquely banal like He had it coming or It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. I was numb.

  Finally I said, Since we’re not going to look for whoever murdered Boris, I guess we’ve run out of the killers who actually do Abner’s dirty work. That leaves us with the master puppeteer himself, Mr. Abner Brown.

  —

  No, Simon had no need to hear this ghastly story. But I could now hope to get thoughts about Boris out of my head and concentrate on the final task before me. I had a week to lay the ground. A lot of time, but not too much. But while resolving to forget Boris seemed easy enough, making good on the resolution turned out to be no more possible than to forget Kerry. Horribly, obscenely, the two were intertwined. Pimps are like catnip, Johnnie had said. The vigorous although not necessarily violent sex, including anal. Now the images of his tattooed prick and forearm. Did she draw her finger over the cross when they sat at the bar? Did she suck the monogrammed prick, when she lay down on the bed at that hotel? What kind of idiot are you, I screamed at myself, how can there be any doubt she sucked? But she wasn’t lying on the bed. She was on her knees, gagging and sucking and gagging. He would have told her: Suck big little Boris, bitch. Or filth worse than that.

  It was ten o’clock. Heidi didn’t come to dinner; she went instead with her parents to a nephew’s bar mitzvah, having told them that she invited me but really with my bum leg I couldn’t go to a service where I would have to sit more than twenty minutes without taking a few steps and certainly couldn’t stand up at a reception. I put on a sweater and the blazer I’d worn when I went down to Le Raton and had a taxi take me to Hotel Leblon, a block west from the Rat. Two old wrecks, the canes of the fatter one and the walker belonging to the other at their side, were sprawled catatonically in adjoining armchairs. Nylons rolled down to the ankles. Feet in orthopedic shoes that once were black. Band-Aids covering sores on knees and calves. Wearing something like housedresses. The fatter one almost bald. No one else in the lobby. I knew from Martin that the night man who was on duty on Friday nights was there through Tuesday. Besides, the description matched: Golden Gloves–boxer type gone to seed, cauliflower ear.

  Technology hadn’t caught up with Leblon. Behind the night man was a board with room keys hanging off little hooks. All that was missing were pigeon holes for the guests’ messages and bills.

  Speak to me, I said, putting on my best Sam Spade growl, and dropped two C notes on the desk.

  What do you want, he replied, palming the bills and putting them in his pocket.

  Tell me what happened the night Kerry Black overdosed in 522.

  You a cop? I’ve talked to you guys. Show me your badge.

  I’m not. I was her boyfriend before she dumped me.

  Sorry, chum. It was good riddance.

  Maybe it was, I replied, but I want to know. Tell me what happened.

  Nothing happened. I told the cops all there’s to tell. There was a fucking detective, pushy son of a bitch, Walker or Dork or something like that, went on and on threatening me.

  Threatening you about what?

  Cop stuff. Running a whorehouse, pimping, usual shit. I had nothing to tell him.

  Well, what did happen? Tell me from the time she arrived.

  Be my guest. You paid for it. The broad—I mean your girlfriend—walks in and asks if I have a room. Yeah, I do. $250, payable in advance. All right, she says, and pays with a credit card. That’s how I knew her name was Kerry Black. Then she says there’s a man—Boris—big guy with black hair, will ask for her. Please tell him I’m in 522. She gave me a twenty and went into the elevator.

  He gestured toward a scuffed door across the hall.

  How did she seem?

  How did she seem? Excuse me, but just like all those broads. Shit out of her mind, real high heels, some kind of black outfit unzipped to her belly button, you could see her tits.

  And then?

  And then? This guy Boris came, asked for her, and went upstairs. Later he came back down and left.

  How much later?

  An hour? Probably less.

  Did you notice anything unusual?

  Shit no! How do you know a guy got laid or didn’t?

  I thanked him.

  So long, he replied.

  The Rat was closed. The street was empty. Perhaps Abner had given up on having me tailed. Too bad. This was as good an opportunity to put me out of my misery as any you could imagine. I had the .45 in my waistband, my left arm was almost back to normal, and, contrary to the white lie Heidi told, my leg wasn’t so bad. But all the energy, all alertness, had drained out of me, replaced by a vast fatigue. Or was it sadness? Standing before the door of the Rat I thought I could draw the pistol, blast open the locks, take over, and devastate the place. I’d be gone before the cops or the Rat’s security service arrived—or maybe I wouldn’t. What difference did it make? Was the Rat more to blame than I?

  —

  I waited until Friday. No use, I said to myself, giving the son of a bitch too much time to work the problem and come up with one of his ploys. First thing in the morning Texas time, I called him. On my landline.

  Hi, Eileen!

  Oh, Captain Dana, sir, she cooed, I was so sorry to hear about your accident on TV and to read about it too.

  It was no accident, sweet Eileen. Just someone’s plan that didn’t pan out. You know what the poet said: “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain….” Is the head mouse in?

  You’re so funny, Captain! You’re killing me! I’ll see if Abner can take you.

  No preliminaries; no I’m putting you right through, sir; no treacly charm wafted by ether. Perhaps the bastard was listening in from the start.

  What’s on your mind, fuckhead, if you have a mind?

  Hello, Abner! Just a couple of things I want to tell you. Item one: I have Kerry’s file, you know which one. Remember? You had Boris murder her so she wouldn’t give it to the grand jury. Item two: I have another file, that’s even better. They’re both going to the government next week. And that will be the end of you. You’ll spend the rest of your life behind bars. Or maybe you’ll hit the jackpot: lethal injection for being a whore for terrorists. Your family will disown you. Out of shame. Linda will divorce you. Those nice sons of yours might kill themselves, like the Madoff kid. Or perhaps they’ll go to jail too.

  You haven’t got dick on me, fuckhead. What is it you want this time?

  Now that I know you’ve murdered Boris? Nothing. Nothing except the
pleasure of seeing your shit-eating face when you browse through the files. I want to bring them to you and let you read them. Oh, and don’t bother having me killed except for the fun of it. The files are going to Uncle Sam whatever happens to me. And they’re going even if I change my mind. And don’t bother trying to get hold of the files. I’ll give you copies myself. The originals are in a place neither you nor your goons can reach.

  I swear I could hear the bastard breathing hard. Like someone gasping for air. I wondered whether he was having a stroke.

  You want to come down here? he asked after a moment.

  No, I told him, I want to see you in New York. You have meetings at the museum Wednesday and Thursday. I’ll see you at your apartment on Wednesday afternoon, at four.

  Silence. The son of a bitch must have been looking at his calendar.

  Can’t do four. Be there at four-thirty.

  Click.

  —

  It was time to bring Scott and Heidi on board with what I had done and what I was planning to do. I called Scott. Susie was just fine, there was no problem with the pregnancy, but real pressures at work. There was no chance of his getting to New York over the weekend or any time the following week before Thursday. Thursday was too late. I had my date with Abner on Wednesday, and I wasn’t about to change it. We could have a telephone conference over the weekend. Late Saturday afternoon worked for him.

  I checked with Heidi. She was staying in town. She’d come over at six-thirty, she told me, only if she could stay for dinner. In that case, I said, I have no choice, so I’m inviting you—very reluctantly—and will ask Feng to whip up something you might like.

  Duck, she replied, any style at all, provided it’s duck!

  Then I called Scott back to tell him the six-thirty call was on, and that Heidi would be there.

  Have you and she gotten together, brother? he asked. It would make Susie and me very happy to know that you’re with someone you love and who loves you.