Killer's Choice Read online

  ALSO BY LOUIS BEGLEY

  FICTION

  Kill and Be Killed

  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 is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, 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 © 2019 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 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.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Begley, Louis, author.

  Title: Killer’s choice : a novel / by Louis Begley.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Nan A. Talese, [2019] |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018034306 (print) | LCCN 2018035348 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385544948 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385544955 (ebook)

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3552.E373 (ebook) | LCC PS3552.E373 K56 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018034306

  Ebook ISBN 9780385544955

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Cover images: cage © silavsale/Shutterstock; man © blackred/E+/Getty Images; sunset © Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Moment/Getty Images

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Louis Begley

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Once again, for Anka and Adam,

  my wonderful first responder readers,

  and for Grisha

  Hush a by Baby

  On the Tree Top

  When the Wind blows

  The cradle will rock.

  If the bough breaks

  The cradle will fall,

  Down tumbles baby

  Cradle and all.

  —MOTHER GOOSE’S MELODY

  I

  There is no end of me, Abner Brown had mocked minutes before he injected himself with the deadly overdose of insulin. I’ve seen to that! There never will be.

  I took those words then to be more of the braggadocio the diabolical Texas billionaire had been spouting ever since I dumped on his desk the files I said I would deliver the next day to the U.S. attorney. Files certain to put Abner behind bars for the rest of his life, or on death row if they helped prove that he had used interstate means to commission murders. Words I was glad to forget. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that he was insane.

  But I am getting ahead of my story. My name is Jack Dana. I am a former Marine Corps Infantry officer and a graduate of its toughest combat schools. The Force Recon platoon I commanded was on patrol in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, near Delaram, when a Taliban sniper got me. His bullet did serious damage to my pelvis. It took a good deal of time and surgeons’ skill to make me almost as good as new, although not good enough for active duty with Corps Infantry. When Walter Reed Army Medical Center finally released me, I could have gone back to the fancy academic career on which I had embarked before 9/11 and before I decided to join the marines so as not to leave the fighting to poor saps who hadn’t had my sort of privileged upbringing and didn’t know any better. But while in the hospital, I began writing about what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been like, and what they had done to my men and me. Completing that book became my only goal. I did finish it, living in New York with my uncle Harry Dana, a prominent lawyer who was like a father to me. Closer to me than my real father. He was also the last living member of my family. My book turned out to be an immediate success; the advance I received, the royalties that followed, the sale of the movie rights, and the bonus to which I became entitled when the movie turned out to be a runaway hit all made me rich. The novels that followed were almost equally successful.

  So without my having planned it, writing became my profession.

  Once again, I’m getting ahead of the story. Soon after my first book came out, while I was vacationing in Brazil on a fazenda without Internet or cell-phone connection, my uncle Harry was murdered. The murder, disguised as a suicide by hanging, was committed by a hit man called Slobo commissioned by Abner Brown, who had been Harry’s principal client. The following day, the same hit man killed Harry’s longtime secretary. He pushed her under a subway train. I avenged those murders, as well as the murder, months later, of Kerry Black, my uncle’s favorite associate and later young partner, who had helped me get the goods on Brown, the file I gave to the U.S. attorney that led to Abner’s ultimate defeat. We had fallen in love passionately, but she dumped me after I killed Slobo instead of only disabling that thug and turning him over to the police. It was murder that Kerry told me I’d committed, and not homicide in legitimate self-defense. Poor Kerry! Abner did not forget the role she played in helping me assemble the dossier laying bare his criminal affair. He had her murdered too, murder disguised this time as her having overdosed on a lethal mixture of drugs.

  I was not able to kill Kerry’s assassin. Abner had him murdered before I could find him. But once I knew that thug was dead, once I had seen Abner give himself that fatal injection, I stopped thinking about Abner and his crimes. I was tired. Tired of Abner and of the killing I’d done to even the score with him and to stop his hit men, of whom he seemed to have an inexhaustible supply, from killing me. Yes, the wounds I had suffered in the encounter with the last of that lot had healed, but even flesh wounds that require only minimal surgery and heal without major complications take some squeak out of you—my poor lovely mother’s favorite expression. Besides, I was absorbed by work on a new book.

  In that book, about the murder of my uncle Harry, I told the truth—I declared on the first page that I was telling a true story. For some reviewers what the murderer, Slobo, had done and my duty to avenge my uncle weighed little in comparison with society’s interest in bringing Slobo to justice, giving him his day in court. Didn’t I know that this is the United States of America, where the rule of law prevails? You bet! The same rule of law that lets billionaires like Abner Brown send rivers of money to PACs and think tanks backing every extreme right-wing cause they can find or dream up and buy and put in their pocket a good half of the U.S. Congr
ess. The rivers of money that have corrupted American politics so thoroughly that a candidate as grotesquely unfit as Donald J. Trump could become president. That kind of rule of law is not good enough for me. I didn’t go to war to make America great again—it was plenty great, so far as I was concerned. I wanted America to be decent again. A country that gives suckers an even break, that cares for the weak and needy. If I had still had Slobo or Abner on my mind after my book’s appearance, I might have taken out a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review promising solemnly to deal in the future with hit men sent by extremist nuts and their employers exactly as I had dealt with Slobo and his employer.

  But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was obsessed by the damage the Trump administration was doing to the country at home and abroad. Every thought I could spare was for a girl with whom I was head over heels in love: an impossibly lovely, elegant, and clever lady litigator, Heidi Krohn. Heidi had been Kerry’s best friend. She became my partner in the quest to avenge Kerry and destroy Abner. But, from the first, she set the rules. She was not attracted physically to men, she warned me when we first met. It hadn’t always been so, she said, and it might not be so forever. We shook hands on that, and, in time, I came to have grounds to think that for once I was playing my cards right: patience and forbearance were paying off. Just a few weeks after Abner died, Heidi spent the Christmas vacation with me at the house in Sag Harbor I inherited from my uncle Harry. I gave her the master bedroom, thinking that I would occupy a guest room across the hall, but she invited me to share her bed. Only to “cuddle,” she specified. We have cuddled ever since, of late dispensing with the tops of our pajamas, and, although she didn’t give up her pad on Lexington and Eighty-Seventh, many weekday nights she could be found at my Fifth Avenue apartment, another property I inherited from Uncle Harry. If we decided to go to the country, she’d stay at my house in Sag Harbor, paying only brief visits to her parents, whose house is in East Hampton on Further Lane. And she brought over to Fifth Avenue much of her wondrous wardrobe and the true love of her life, a coal-black one-and-a-half-year-old French bulldog named Satan. It’s much better for him to be with you, across the street from Central Park, than to sit alone all day at my apartment waiting for the walker to take him out. These were the surest signs, I believe, that we were on the right track.

  * * *

  —

  The call came shortly after eleven, on a Wednesday night. She was once again in Hong Kong, leading the defense in an arbitration brought against a new client, a huge Japanese construction company. I had tried to work on my new book, had dinner at home, and when the phone rang had been about to go to bed. Picking up the receiver, I expected to hear her voice—I could think of no one else who’d call at that hour—but instead I heard screams. Screams more awful than any I had ever heard. Worse than the screaming of marines in Iraq or Afghanistan with limbs torn off by an IED or stomach wounds so bad the intestines were exposed, worse than the howling of a Taliban prisoner in Delaram some CIA contractors were working over, they rose in unbearable crescendo. Transfixed with horror, I didn’t hang up. After a time, which then seemed interminable but, in reality, was no more than five minutes, a man’s deep voice addressed me. Loud enough to be heard over the screaming.

  Nice, the man said, your friends scream good. Boss said let him listen and enjoy.

  He fell silent. I couldn’t stop listening or bring myself to hang up.

  He spoke again.

  So long now. We keep working.

  Again, he fell silent, but the screams continued, louder and, if possible, even more desperate. Then the line went dead.

  I pressed the Off button on the receiver and feverishly—my hands were trembling—scrolled down to the list of incoming calls. The most recent was from Simon Lathrop, followed by a 917 telephone number.

  Simon Lathrop, my uncle Harry’s law partner, law school classmate, and best friend! My cell phone was on the desk. I navigated to Contacts, typed in Simon’s name, and found the address and telephone number of his weekend house in Bedford. The telephone numbers were identical. No, this could not be some macabre joke. I had to get through to the local police—without wasting a moment. I called 911 and was transferred to the Bedford Police Department. I told the female dispatcher that I believed a gruesome crime was being committed at Mr. Simon Lathrop’s house. She knew who he was and where he lived and took down my name, address, and telephone number.

  I’m sending a cruiser over there right away, she said, and I’ll be in touch with the chief.

  Judging by what I heard on the phone, I told her, you probably want more than one officer at that house.

  You may be right, she replied. We’ll see what we can do.

  Good luck, I said. I’m taking my car and should be at the Lathrops’ within the hour.

  * * *

  —

  I talked my way past a cordon of cops and state troopers and got to the front porch of the house. There, a corpulent civilian in his fifties introduced himself as Assistant D.A. Steve Bruni of the Investigations Division and said, You’re Captain Dana. I’ve read your book Returning, and I’ve seen the movie. First-rate. I’m a fan. Look, I know about your service with the marines and I know you’ve seen a lot of killing. Guess you’ve done some yourself, including those two hit men in Sag Harbor. Yes, I looked you up as soon as I heard the perpetrators called you and you were coming over. But what we’ve got here is not like any crime scene I’ve seen in my career, and I’ve seen plenty. Before this job, when I was a special agent, I worked on organized crime. It’s worse than the photos of the Manson family and Sharon Tate. A real cult massacre. I doubt you’ve seen anything like it either and I’m not sure you want to look at it.

  I think I have to, I answered. Simon Lathrop was a friend.

  All right, just remember I warned you. They did a job on the house too.

  The house is a big white Victorian structure. I followed Bruni inside and, as soon as we entered, I saw what Bruni meant. Someone had gone through the ground-floor rooms with a baseball bat or an ax and a knife, breaking furniture, taking paintings off the walls and kicking them in, and slashing the cushions of sofas and armchairs.

  Bruni spoke again: The bodies are upstairs, in the master bedroom. We’ve got people everywhere taking photographs and looking for fingerprints and all the other usual stuff.

  Indeed, the house was swarming with state troopers and civilians.

  I pointed with my chin at the civilians and raised my eyebrows.

  FBI, Bruni told me. When I told the D.A. what went on here, he called the Manhattan assistant Bureau head at home and asked the FBI to step in on a provisional basis. He thinks this has the hallmarks of an organized-crime job. You’ll see. Jack Curley doesn’t let grass grow under his feet, and the Lathrops are important people.

  He paused at the door of the bedroom and said, Now fasten your seat belt. The bodies are as we found them.

  Bruni was right: I’ve seen my share of dead bodies, including bodies torn apart by explosions or cut into pieces by heavy machine-gun fire. But none of them matched what had been done to Simon and Jennie Lathrop. They were both naked. Simon had been crucified, nailed to a closet door, four- or five-inch spikes through his hands and feet. His penis and testicles had been sliced off. Most of his skin had been flayed, long strips left hanging.

  This took time, Bruni observed. They slit his throat. That probably came at the end as they left. Some coup de grâce!

  I nodded. I don’t think I was capable of speech.

  Jennie was on the bed. Her breasts had been cut off. Looking at her, I realized that the closet door to which Simon was nailed faced the bed, so that he would have seen every detail of what was done to her and, indeed, I now noticed that her breast lay on the floor, at Simon’s feet. She’d been raped—no other word came into my mind—with a thick stick that had been left lying on the
bed, and perhaps with other objects too. Her thighs were covered with blood. The bedding was soaked with blood. They hadn’t flayed her. Instead, they had used a cruder form of torture. Her body was covered with burns. Some seemed like cigarette burns; others were round but probably too big to have been made with a cigarette. Her fingernails had been pulled out. The pliers too had been left on the bed.

  Steady, Captain Dana, Bruni said, I told you this was bad. And it must have taken a long time. They made it take a long time.

  Yes, I answered. Yes, there must have been at least two of them.

  Bruni nodded. Yes, perhaps more.

  Any fingerprints, anything that might identify them?

  So far, zero. But we’ll give the house another going-over tomorrow morning. The bodies will stay here until we’ve finished. And no tire tracks or anything like them outside. As you saw, we parked way down the driveway, to leave the turnaround outside the house undisturbed. They didn’t break in. Either Mr. Lathrop let them in, or the door was open, or they had a pretty good set of passkeys. By the way, can you identify the bodies for us?

  Of course, I said.

  That’s helpful. The D.A. would like to speak to you tomorrow afternoon. The office is in White Plains. Do you think you can be there at two?

  Of course, I said again. I’ll be there.

  The identification formalities finished, Bruni gave me his card with the office address and telephone numbers on it. We shook hands, and, as I turned to leave, he said, Look, Captain Dana, I know you can take care of yourself, but this is very bad stuff. Be on your guard!

  * * *

  —

  Feng, my combination houseman, gourmet cook, and, ever since he shot, in the nick of time, the last of the killers Abner had sent to finish me off, my savior and self-appointed bodyguard, greeted me at the door of my apartment. It was a few minutes past five in the morning. I had driven back to the city from Bedford very slowly, trying both to erase from my field of vision the images of Simon and Jennie and to begin to make sense of what had happened. This savage attack on a dignified, honorable old couple: Who would have chosen them as the target? Who would have carried it out? What was the meaning of the telephone call to me? Yes, Simon was my friend, but our perfectly cordial contacts were infrequent. He was an important senior partner at Jones & Whetstone, a leading New York City law firm, a fixture on the boards of the Metropolitan Museum and the Metropolitan Opera and probably other great cultural institutions in the city. He and Jennie were sociable, mentioned regularly in the press as attending this or that charity dinner or ball. If the idea was to spread terror among their acquaintances, I was willing to bet there were at least twenty people on terms of more intimate friendship with them.