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

firing PK machine guns, and wiped the rebels out. Two hundred more people died. As payment, Perseus Group took a half share in Kisie’s mining operations, which Klay was sure had been Krieger’s strategy from the beginning. No one reported either of the massacres. He had not reported them. Kisie was just another African insurgency put down. Perseus Group was outside of scope. And now he worked for the man.

Ever since Krieger’s hologram event, Klay’s nightmares had become more frequent and more intense. He had been reliving the accident in Indonesia on and off for more than a decade. Bernard’s murder had twisted itself into that nightmare. And both of these deaths were threads woven into the formative tragedy in his life, which had shaped him and his dreams since he was a child. A child who had witnessed his mother’s murder.

No. He would not work for Terry Krieger. His work for the CIA was over, too.

He pressed the small black doorbell.

By the time he left this building, he’d be free to press the reset button on his life. What that meant, he didn’t yet know. He could always become an embalmer, lay people out in a box again instead of on the page. He could write obits—charming little tales about men and women who’d led surprising, underappreciated lives. Buy a house “down the shore,” as they said back home, finally get that Chesapeake Bay retriever, find a lover, lead a charming, underappreciated life of his own.

The door opened. An older black man in a waiter’s uniform greeted him.

“Hello, Arno,” Klay said.

“Good evening, Mr. Klay. Mr. Eady’s expecting you upstairs.”

•   •   •

The club’s charter hung just inside the door.

To foster mutual improvement, education, and enlightenment, convivial men the world over find pleasure and recreation in association with others like minded to relieve the spirit of what some call the monotony of domestic life and the routine and toil of business. The Club provides its members with a place to confess what they would not share with wives or family . . .

“No women then,” Klay said, reading it on his first visit to Eady’s club.

“They say Pamela Harriman made herself an exception, but no,” Eady said. “No women.” The lower hall and stairwell were lined with portraits of the club’s past members. Eady pointed some out as they walked. “Theodore, not Franklin,” he said of the Roosevelts. “The man himself,” introduced Major General William J. Donovan. Brown Brothers Harriman, the Goldman Sachs of its day, was well represented over the years. “Some of the Wise Men,” Eady continued, indicating Harriman, Acheson, Kennan, Bohlen, and John J. McCloy—“another Philadelphia man and a friend.” Eady winked. “Ford—no, by the way,” he said of Nixon.

“A lot of old white men,” Klay said.

“That’s true,” Eady said, “but we’re changing. That’s all I can say. I can’t talk about living members.”

Klay scanned the gallery. The portraits were not only all white men, he realized, they were all dead white men.

On his next visit Klay arrived early, so Arno Tyne had directed him upstairs to wait. As he climbed the stairs, he heard the local NPR station blaring Bill Clinton’s scratchy drawl. Upon reaching the second floor he was surprised to find the ex-president sitting forward in a wingback chair, that big red nose, puffy white hair, and confident smile working cheerily on a dour William Rehnquist. Clinton was taller than he’d expected; Rehnquist was frailer. “If you like those Hush Puppies,” Clinton was saying, patting the chief justice’s bony forearm, “the chukkas with arch support will completely change your life.”

The second floor was dark and empty tonight, so Klay continued up the stairs to the top floor. He heard voices as he climbed and recognized the cadence of Eady’s low murmur set against loud, unfamiliar bursts. Klay hesitated. He had thought he’d have Eady to himself tonight. He stepped quietly, and arrived at the doorway without drawing attention.

Eady sat in an oxblood leather wingback, on the opposite side of the room, beneath a small painting. He held a pipe in one hand, and had one leg crossed over the other. He was talking to a stranger who looked to be about Eady’s age, but instead of sporting thick white hair like Eady, the man’s head was bald and dotted with liver spots. The man wore a brown suit, white dress shirt, and cowboy boots. He had a big, hard gut that looked like it could take a punch. Something about the man told Klay it had.

Still unobserved, Klay tried and failed to get a bead on the men’s relationship. Eady wore his enigmatic smile, and there was something slightly off in his companion’s loud laugh. The stranger grabbed a fistful of mixed nuts from a dish on a table between them. He raised a hand in the air and called out, “Alfred!”

Which is when they noticed Klay.

“Well, here he is,” the stranger said, dusting salt from his hands.

Klay shook Eady’s hand, reflexively making his mortician’s assessment. It was something that happened, growing up in a funeral home, working as a door greeter. Most people die of old age, and their mourners tend to be elderly also. Shake enough elderly hands and you develop an ability to intuit a person’s state of health. The grip and musculature of a handshake could give you an idea of how many years a person had left.

Klay felt a reasonable hump of muscle between Eady’s thumb and index finger, and solid musculature among his metacarpals. The creping in the skin on the back of Eady’s hand was normal, too. Things must have been going well with his treatments, Klay thought. Or maybe it was still early. He’d never asked Eady what form of cancer he had or its stage. If he didn’t hear the details tonight, he promised himself he would call Ruth later in the week.

The stranger’s grip, by contrast, was firm and calloused, the hand of someone who did more than he appeared to do.

“Have a seat, son,” the stranger