Kill and Be Killed Read online

  ALSO BY LOUIS BEGLEY

  FICTION

  Killer, Come Hither

  Memories of a Marriage

  Schmidt Steps Back

  Matters of Honor

  Shipwreck

  Schmidt Delivered

  Mistler’s Exit

  About Schmidt

  As Max Saw It

  The Man Who Was Late

  Wartime Lies

  NONFICTION

  Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters

  Franz Kafka: The Tremendous World I Have in My Head

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Louis Begley 2007 Revocable Trust

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Doubleday is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover images: skyline © Chris Hepburn/Getty Images; bear trap © Wire_man/Shutterstock; man © Hamza Tarkkol/Getty Images

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Begley, Louis.

  Title: Kill and be killed : a novel / Louis Begley.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015035926 | ISBN 9780385540711 (hardcover) 9780385540728 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Authors—Fiction. | Murder—Investigation—Fiction. | Revenge—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION Literary. | FICTION Thrillers. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.E373 K54 2016 | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2015035926

  eBook ISBN 9780385540728

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Louis Begley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  For Anka and Adam,

  my first responder readers

  I

  Solitude, the charm of Torcello, the island in the Lagoon of Venice on which I had taken refuge after I left New York City, almost daily contemplation in the basilica of the great mosaic of the Last Judgment, and, above all, time had done their work. The wound caused by Kerry’s leaving me closed, but a blush of shame still came over my face when I recalled her parting words: I can’t stand the way you smell when you touch me, you smell of blood. But the wound and the hurt were slowly becoming an attenuated memory, like the recollection of my beautiful mother’s struggle with cancer and her long agony. For all the sorrow, I remained unable to muster any remorse for the way I killed Slobo. Yes, I had watched him bleed, and yes, I had made sure, before I called 911, that he had bled enough for the chances of his being alive and receiving a transfusion when the ambulance brought him from Sag Harbor to the hospital in Southampton to be nil. But the son of a bitch had tortured and killed my beloved uncle Harry, and tortured and killed his beautiful cat, whom I also loved. Was I to hand over that contract killer, wanted by Interpol and who knows how many other police forces, to the Suffolk County D.A. so he could plea-bargain his way to a twelve-, fifteen-year sentence? Never. I’d made no secret of my intention to kill Slobo. A tough, bright, big-time litigator like Kerry, with prosecutorial experience, should have found a way to let me know that if I didn’t play the game according to Hoyle she’d dump me, that self-defense, to which she allowed I was entitled in a confrontation with Slobo, meant only what New York law provided, using no more force than a reasonable man would think was reasonably needed. How was I to understand this new—it had to be new—squeamishness and sanctimony? I smelled of blood! Where was her fine olfactory sense when we first made love, and went on making love fervently, every night except when she had to be away for client meetings and when I went out of town twice, once to seek advice from my best friend, Scott Prentice, now working for the Agency in Langley, Virginia, and once to beard Abner Brown, the right-wing mogul and devil incarnate who’d sent Slobo on his murderous errand. Had she not smelled during those nights the blood of the men I’d killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, some of them in hand-to-hand combat? Or did her fine legal sense tell her that every killing by a Marine Corps Infantry officer and Force Recon platoon commander fighting the Global War on Terror is justified? I would stop these silent rants, realizing that they hurt me even more than Kerry’s rejection. The other side of that coin, the inescapable truth, was that, however much I fumed, I loved her no less than before.

  I emailed her soon after arriving on Torcello, describing—since I knew she’d never seen it—the island’s eerie waterlogged landscape, the glories of the basilica, the refined rustic pleasures offered by the locanda at which I stayed, and screwed up my courage to add that I would be deliriously happy if she came to visit. Her answer was perhaps three lines long. It told me she was glad I had gone to a place so much to my taste and ignored the invitation to join me. I am embarrassed to say that I persevered. Not to the point, it would seem, of becoming enough of a nuisance for her to block my emails, but writing often enough about my daily life to get her to understand that she was very present in my thoughts. I wanted to avoid the impression that I dashed off notes to her when, like all professional writers who work on a computer, I needed a break and felt the urgent need to Google such red-hot subjects as Cabo Verde or the year in which Mother’s Day was first celebrated, or to send long-overdue emails to friends dwelling in the suburbs of my affection. Most of those messages remained unanswered.

  I am a novelist. A large part of my first book, about the two wars I’d been to, in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wrote at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where surgeons repaired damage a sniper in Sangin had done to my pelvis. More novels followed. On Torcello, I began a book relating the story of Uncle Harry’s murder and the vengeance I exacted. Working on it made it impossible not to think about Kerry, not only because she was my girl during that time but also because she had been Harry’s protégée and his partner at the law firm and had led me to grasp why Abner Brown decided he had to get Harry out of the way. Turning those events over in my mind, I wrote to her again, at much greater length, explaining more lucidly, I hoped, than when I had argued with her face-to-face why she should accept that Slobo had amply deserved to be killed as I had killed him, that what had been done could not be undone, and that we should not sacrifice our love to the chimera of legality. Her one-sentence answer came swiftly. It’s no use writing, Jack, she wrote, I’ve moved on. She signed “Kerry”—without a closing. No “Love” or “Be well” or “Regards”—but perhaps that was better. Loveless love and empty words might have stung more. But I was left with a tormenting question. What did she mean? Was she telling me that she had someone else and the rights and wrongs of her dismissing me on account of Slobo had become moot? Could she possibly mean that she had lost interest in Abne
r Brown and his empire of crime and no longer cared whether the road map for prosecutors Harry had prepared and that we handed over to the U.S. attorney ever landed him in jail? That couldn’t be. I followed avidly the proceedings brought against Abner’s companies by the SEC, the EPA, the IRS, and the Justice Department whenever they were reported in the press I read online. Simon Lathrop, a senior partner in Harry’s old firm, Jones & Whetstone, and Harry’s best friend going way back to Harvard Law School, emailed me with information appearing in specialized legal and business publications and gossip he picked up. Although Abner Brown himself was not yet under direct attack, his companies were besieged, and the government wasn’t sparing its ammunition. How could she have lost interest? That left a hypothesis that I thought was wildly optimistic but was unwilling to abandon. She was telling me through this message, so curt and brusque because she was too proud to admit she had changed her mind, that she was ready to let the past be the past. Only I would have to plead my case in person. The U.S. government had been shut down for three days, since Tuesday, and no one could predict how long the shutdown would continue, but air traffic controllers remained on the job, keeping—one hoped—their eyes on those computer screens. It was time to take Kerry in my arms, to inhale the head-spinning mixture of soap and fresh sweat that wet her armpits as soon as she was aroused. I had voted by absentee ballot for Obama and was elated by his victory. Ever since, it had seemed to me that the country that had made so decisively the right decision had gone mad. How many times had the House Republicans voted to repeal Obamacare? Twenty-five? Thirty? Was there any measure that carried the country’s work forward around which they would coalesce? I didn’t think that going home would give me a clearer picture, but I was returning for the most important affair of my life, to win Kerry back and not out of some half-baked sense of civic duty. I had given seven years of my life to unstinting service on the battlefield. Basta così! Those that remained would be devoted to my books and loving Kerry. I bought a seat on a direct flight from Venice’s Marco Polo to JFK for the following Tuesday and alerted to my arrival Harry’s housekeeper, Jeanette, who had been with him for decades and had agreed to stay and work for me.

  As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport. Early October may be the most agreeable season in Venice and on Torcello. The air is mild. The rare tourists are apt to be serious people, interested in architecture and art. They speak in low voices. On Sunday I was having what I thought of as my farewell lunch of pasta frutti di mare and a Friuli white wine in the garden of my locanda when my cell phone rang. It was pure chance that I had turned it on and put it in the pocket of my jacket. Most of the time I left it on the worktable in my room. The reception was spotty, no one telephoned me, and I used my cell phone, if at all, to check on email when I was away from the locanda. My heart leaped with excitement when I saw in the caller-ID window Simon Lathrop’s name. I was sure he was calling because there had been an important development in the government litigation against Abner Brown’s companies. Still, calling on Sunday…As soon as I heard his voice, quavering and weak, I knew I was wrong. This wasn’t about litigation.

  Jack, he said, it’s a tragedy.

  He seemed unable to continue, so I urged him. What happened, Simon, what is the matter?

  Kerry. He got out the word with difficulty. She died on Friday night. In a hotel room in Chelsea. Of an overdose. She’d been at some club down there. A place called Le Raton. Then she checked into this hotel and did it. The chambermaid found her on Saturday morning. There’ll probably be something in the Times online Breaking News. I wanted to be sure I got to you before you read it. Such a tragedy!

  But she didn’t use drugs when we were together, I told him. It wasn’t a long time, but except when she was at the office I was with her practically every evening, every night. There was no hint of anything of the sort. How is it possible? How can such a thing be?

  I realized I was pleading with him, as though he had the power to change what had happened.

  There was a long silence, and I thought the call had been dropped. But he spoke again.

  Jack, he said, things aren’t always as they seem. Rob Mooney, that’s the firm’s new chairman, has asked me to ride herd on this, and I’ve been talking to the D.A.—he’s a good fellow and I know him well from a City Bar committee I chaired—and to the people he’s put in charge of the case. It seems she was a known user at that club. Cocaine and something they call MDMA or E. That Friday night she checked into the hotel alone, paying in advance with a credit card. She was found naked. No signs of struggle, no sign of robbery, her wallet was undisturbed, the door wasn’t forced. She’d injected the stuff into a vein on her arm. Analysis of the syringe showed traces of cocaine, MDMA and impurities often associated with it, and heroin. Apparently a deadly cocktail. She’d been drinking, but the alcohol content in her stomach wasn’t in excess of whatever norm they use. The point is she wasn’t drunk out of her mind. Anyway not too drunk to hit the vein on the first try. They looked for fingerprints, of course. There were her fingerprints everywhere, including on the syringe and the glass in which she mixed the stuff. No other fresh prints. Now you know everything I know. The D.A. thinks it’s an open-and-shut case. Suicide or accident.

  Simon, I said, forcing myself to speak, it’s a question I have to ask, but here it is. Had she had sex?

  Unclear, dear boy, unclear. As they put it, the condition of the organs was consistent with sex. Vigorous though not necessarily violent sex. They couldn’t determine when the sex would have taken place. No semen was found.

  It was my turn to fall silent. I was weeping. As soon as I controlled myself I told Simon I’d made arrangements to be back in the city on Tuesday on a direct flight from Venice. There was some chance that I could catch a plane to Rome or Paris that would get to JFK early on Monday. If I did that, would I be in time for the funeral?

  There won’t be one, Jack. She left her body to New York–Presbyterian with instructions that what remained after the organs had been harvested be cremated. Frankly I don’t know—and haven’t had time to find out—if they can use organs in a case like this, but I’m sure they’ll try, and they’ll surely honor her wishes and go ahead with the cremation. After consulting some of the seniors, we decided, Rob and I, that we would put a short and dignified obituary notice in the Times, but we would not hold a memorial service. In the circumstances we think it would be unseemly.

  As I listened to Simon drone on so reasonably I realized that I was beginning to feel sick. The waiter had taken away my plate with the uneaten pasta but had left my wineglass. I raised it to my lips and sipped very slowly.

  Are the parents still alive? I asked when I thought he had finished. Are there any other relatives?

  I believe that the father died a few months ago. The mother is alive. She may be in some sort of retirement community. That Jewish lawyer you use has Kerry’s will and is her executor. He’ll be on top of all that.

  Yes, I muttered. Moses. Moses Cohen. It was Kerry who suggested I turn to him. Perhaps I’ll give him a call.

  And then I recognized with a start something that had become obvious.

  Simon, I said, I’m going to cancel my flight to New York. Whatever else I may have been telling myself, the real reason I wanted to return was to win back my poor Kerry. Now there’s no point. I won’t stay here forever, but I can work here pretty well. The time to return will come, but not now. I can’t go back now.

  I understand, Simon answered. Perhaps Jennie and I will first see you in Venice. We too need to get away.

  Just as we were going to hang up, a question occurred to me.

  You’ve stayed in touch with her, right? What was she like during the last months? Was she functioning at the office? Getting her work done?

  That’s the strangest thing, Simon replied. There was no change in her. She was doing a brilliant job on a major litigation for Western Industries. The word about an injunction she’d gotten against
a competitor in an unfair advertising action had gotten around, and she was asked by a major new client to review a litigation it’s planning to bring. It will be hard to reassign her work and keep the clients satisfied. But I gather that high-performing people can keep cocaine use under control. Something went desperately wrong on Friday night. She made a gross mistake.

  —

  I was awake until well past two during the night that followed, reliving every moment I had spent with Kerry. How could I have been so obtuse and failed to notice signs of drug use, perhaps addiction? She was such a straight arrow, so much the all-American girl. A former federal prosecutor, for Christ’s sake! How could I have suspected that concealed behind the façade were Mollies, cocaine, and even heroin? If she was addicted, how did she manage to stay off that stuff while I was there? What depths of unhappiness had she hidden from me—and from Harry and the other Jones & Whetstone partners who took her into the firm a year ahead of schedule? By what miracle had it been possible for her to shoulder the weight of a young litigating partner’s responsibilities? I didn’t know the answer to those questions. Instead, my own insomnia reminded me of our first night together, when I had lain awake for what seemed like hours, savoring the soundness of her sleep. The memory brought to my consciousness another one, which was perhaps less innocent, of looking for dental floss in her bathroom and, having opened a medicine cabinet that turned out not to hold the floss, coming upon a comically long row of amber vials that held pills of various shapes and colors. Somebody is unable to throw away any medicine the doctor prescribes—I chuckled—just like my mother! Indeed my lovely mother had never separated herself from the expired antibiotics, cough remedies, and allergy pills that had turned her bathroom shelves into something resembling a dispensary. That amusing trait, which had enchanted me—just as did Kerry’s serving hors d’oeuvres exactly the way my mother might have done—now seemed to me a potential warning I had ignored. Of course, I had not examined those vials. But now it seemed to me not unlikely that they held, instead of just antacids, antihistamines, and leftover amoxicillin, also Prozac, Zoloft, and Xanax and a junkie’s hoard of Klonopin, Ativan & Co., as well as, of course, Ambien, Halcion, and, if she could find someone to prescribe or sell it, Seconal. I cursed my stupid good manners. If I’d seen Prozac or Zoloft I might at least have understood that she was in treatment for depression, that she was vulnerable. I might have made a connection between them and her strange, overwrought confession of guilt feelings and cowardice. Culpable cowardice? Because the need to pay the facility where her demented father was hospitalized made her afraid of antagonizing the management of her law firm? Nothing could be more natural, or easier to understand, than her sense that she mustn’t put at risk her future at that place and her ability to earn a large income. Instead, all I saw before me was a superwoman who also happened to be the best lover I’d ever had.