In the Company of Killers, Bryan Christy [love story books to read .txt] 📗

Klay dreaming of winning those Golden Gloves. Getting told his feet were buckets of cement. “You no Primo Carnera,” the old Sicilian barked at him. “You gotta mean. You gotta quick. You gotta fast.” But the bodies stacking up said maybe his coach had it wrong. Maybe Klay was fast enough already. Maybe his feet moved so fast nobody could see them.

Then came the Fight.

His opponent was out of Joe Frazier’s Gym on North Broad. Bryant “Lump” Sanders had the look of a heavyweight and a sledgehammer right hand. Klay had fought bigger men who hit harder, but in the fourth round, when Klay wasn’t looking, Sanders’s brothers had climbed into the ring with him. Maybe his sister, too. How else to explain that many gloves landing on him at once. Klay learned the meaning of the word “speed” that night. The doctor inspecting Klay’s eye afterwards told him sure, he could keep fighting, but he was laughing. “We’ll call you Helen ‘the Keller’ Klay.”

“But you liked it?” Eady pressed, studying Klay’s eyes.

Klay sensed he was entering a life moment. Here he was, a Philadelphia mortician’s kid, standing in a Virginia country mansion, talking to the editor in chief of The Sovereign, a man who rarely spoke to writers directly and never invited them to his home. It all felt so unreal, so completely foreign, he decided to act against his instincts. He told Eady the truth. He didn’t like boxing; he loved it. “No better feeling in the world than dropping a guy with a clean shot.”

Eady took a moment before responding. “How about a shot that’s not so clean?” he countered. Presenting the fly.

They were in the summer kitchen now, Eady standing over a small table covered in newspaper, working a fillet knife up a trout’s belly, Klay seeing things he’d sensed about Eady come into focus.

“So—” Eady turned to face him. “Would you like a second job? It’s called the CIA’s National Resources Division, Tom. You’d work for me. Exclusively.”

“Natural Resources Division?”

Eady laughed. “National. National Resources, Tom.”

“I thought the CIA couldn’t work domestically.”

Eady ripped the fish’s guts free, yanked them toward the fish’s throat, then sliced them loose. He tossed the organs into a pail.

“We can. And we do. Most of NR’s work is debriefing American business executives returned from overseas trips. College professors and scientists back from foreign conferences. It’s light, informal. Maintenance, really. You would be something a bit more . . .” Eady searched for the right word. “Intentional.”

A caddis fly—that’s how Eady put it—a simple gatherer of information with antennae so long and slender as to be nearly invisible.

Eady turned on the deep well sink, rinsed his knife, and began washing his hands under the tap using a bar of soap. “You’ll be part of an unheralded, secret tradition, Tom. The Sovereign’s partnership with the Agency stretches back generations. Before CIA was CIA.”

He switched off the tap, slid his knife blade through a towel, and hung it on a magnetic knife rack beside the sink. “The Brits got us started. They ran a propaganda shop out of Rockefeller Center, pumped anti-Nazi stories to the old Herald Tribune, the New York Post, the Baltimore Sun, trying to get the Americans to join them in the fight. Pearl Harbor sped things up, and the Brits handed their operation over to our OSS. Morale operations, it became. Many of America’s best reporters, writers, cartoonists, and radio broadcasters served the war effort.”

Eady opened a cabinet above his sink and took out a bottle of scotch. He poured two glasses and handed one to Klay.

“The Sovereign’s role was something special,” he continued. “Richard Helms, future CIA director—who recruited me, incidentally—started out as a journalist with the United Press. Dick interviewed Hitler. Hitler was obsessed with America’s eugenics programs. Wanted to know all he could about it. The American argument distilled, being that healthier humans meant lower taxes.”

Eady opened a door separating the kitchen from the main house, and three Jack Russell terriers darted into the room. “Ruth!” he called, ignoring the dogs. “Ruth!”

Ruth Eady, a petite woman with neat gray hair, a sad smile, and the hands of a persistent gardener, appeared in the doorway holding a plate of cheese and raw vegetables. She wore a bright yellow apron over a pale blue blouse.

“We’ll join you in ten or so, darling,” Eady said, accepting the snack plate.

Ruth looked from Eady to Klay and then down at the glass of scotch beside each man. She picked up Eady’s glass, took a sip, and placed the glass back on the counter beside him. “I’ll wait ’til I see the whites of your eyes.” She smiled and picked up the dish with Eady’s trout. “Come on, dogs.”

“Find yourself a good woman, Tom,” Eady said, topping off their glasses. “I could start with that. Or end there. Have you?”

Klay thought of Erin. “Not sure,” he said.

“To the chase, then,” Eady said, and clinked Klay’s glass. “Where was I?”

“Hitler,” Klay said.

Eady put his nose in his glass and inhaled his whiskey before resuming. “Hitler took the American eugenics effort further in every way, of course. Crucially, he extended his theories on the Aryan individual to the state. Germany made ill by her ‘lesser races.’ Jews, a disease; gypsies, an infestation. He used language to justify his savagery. It wasn’t murder, it was cleansing. Immigrants weren’t human beings, they were invasive species. Words made all the difference. Which is where we came in.

“The Sovereign had been reporting favorably on the American eugenics movement. ‘Why should Hereford bulls and Rhode Island Reds benefit more from selective breeding than we humans?’—that kind of thing. Then an American intelligence officer discovered a reference to The Sovereign in a German eugenics journal. The Nazis’ top scientists were reading us.

“That’s when Bill Donovan came to us with a special request. You recognize that name?”

“Father of the CIA. They called him Wild Bill.”

“Donovan’s request was simple: double down. We agreed. We ran a feature on European architecture, praising Berlin. We followed up with