In the Company of Killers Bryan Christy (good books to read for beginners .txt) 📖

picked up an iPad from her glass coffee table. “We’re going all-digital.” She tapped the screen, sighed. “Your work is analog. I’m looking at your expenses. Twelve months for a single story?”

She swiped a finger up the screen. “You regularly miss your deadlines.”

“I take the time the stories need.”

“This goes back years,” she said, paging through. “Extravagant expenditures. A pet store? You bought a pet store?”

The pet store had been cover for a piece on Mexican drug trafficking. Narcos love exotics, especially birds and white tigers.

“We got a good deal on it.”

“Is that a joke?”

Klay had his own question: Who’d assembled this file for her? Porfle? Giovanni, the photography editor? Fucking photographers.

“We’ve had some good results, Sharon.”

“When I need results, I call a plumber. We’re in the news business here.”

“That’s funny.”

“That’s funny?”

“I thought we were in the insight business, not the news business—telling people why over what. At least that’s what they told me my first day here. Vance Eady did.”

“Vance.” She narrowed her eyes and cocked her head, birdlike again. “The accountants are still trying to understand what he was up to.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that.”

“What?”

He pointed to his left ear. “I’m a little deaf in this ear.”

She raised her voice. “I said, the accountants have run into some irregularities when it comes to Mr. Eady. In the best light, they tell me, he took four steps—at four times the cost—to do what could have been done in one.”

Klay laughed.

“Funny again?”

“You think Vance Eady was embezzling?”

“Probably not. No. But we’re looking into it.” She set her iPad down on top of a Wall Street Journal. “Nobody wants to kick a man when he’s down. Certainly not a man who’s meant so much to this institution. To the world.”

She waved a hand and smiled brightly. “Let’s not talk about the past, Tom. We wish him well. He was supportive of PGM hiring me. I appreciate that.”

Klay was distracted by the smell of fresh paint and new carpet. What color carpet did Eady have? He couldn’t recall. How could he not remember the color of the man’s carpet he’d crossed a thousand times?

No whiff of desiccated tissue. No brittle animal fur. No sign Vance Eady had occupied this room at all. In place of his African masks, books, and zebra mount, a large painting hung on the wall above her glass-topped desk. A single blood-red brushstroke on white canvas. A mirror image of the Japanese painting using a black brushstroke hung behind his head.

“Do you know my background, Tom?”

“I saw the email. PR, right?”

He’d had Tenchant pull up some information on her. Married, forty-six. USC. Born in Chicago. Father, psychiatrist specializing in sleep disorders; mother, corporate lawyer; husband, reality television producer. She started in retail, then turned to advertising. Rose to partner at Aegis-Thompson in Los Angeles, which was subsequently acquired by Perseus Group Media. She was active on social media. Tenchant had pulled up her Twitter. “A bit of news: I’m heading to Washington as new EIC at The Sovereign. Psyched for a new PGM challenge! Big boots 2 fill. [Boots emoji]”

Klay told Tenchant not to bother digging any deeper.

“Public relations is selling, Tom. That’s what we’ll be doing now. Selling our information.”

Klay found it hard to concentrate on what she was saying. Eady used to invite new hires to sit on his sofa and describe their futures for him. If they were nervous, which covered just about everyone, he would hand them his ivory walking stick with some line about how everyone needs a little assistance. They’d hold Eady’s walking stick across their laps and tell him what they had planned for their illustrious careers, how they intended to tell stories in ways that refreshed the old and tired Sovereign. “Not your work, of course, Mr. Eady . . .”

Those he liked, Eady let in on his little secret. The rest he sent back to their desks, where they learned from their colleagues that they had nervously rubbed a walrus penis bone for half an hour while talking to God.

She was still talking.

“. . . that’s what I told the board about Prescott & Brower, which was one of my main accounts when I was a partner at Aegis. David Prescott founded P&B in 1892, selling pith helmets and elephant guns. Did you know that?” She paused. “Tom?”

“No.”

“But you see the connection. It, too, was headed for extinction. Enter public relations. Packaging. Brand realignment. We identified P&B’s core deliverable. It wasn’t pith helmets. Or canoes. It was freedom. The African word for freedom is ‘uhuru.’ Did you know that? Of course you did. Our research told us people wanted the name, but not the musty stuff inside. Who needs a compass when we’ve got Google Earth, right? Well, nobody likes freedom more than teenagers. Our path was clear.”

“Really?” Klay said, thinking it was tan of some kind, Eady’s carpet.

“Really. We put P&B’s logo on premium T-shirts, delivered low-cut jeans, gave out flip-flops with bottle openers in the soles to colleges across the country. Yesterday’s pith helmets are the hoodies of today, I like to say. What do you think happened?”

Klay was looking out the window.

“What happened was our market cap jumped to six billion! Are you familiar with the P&B brand, Tom?”

His grandfather had had one of those pith helmets in the attic. Klay wondered if he’d ever used it. Chances were the shotguns in the attic had come from P&B, too. He didn’t know. He had ventured into Prescott & Brower’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue a few years ago. He walked in expecting to find fly rods and hand-strung snowshoes. Instead he’d encountered a world not that different from the sex trafficking markets he’d investigated overseas—teenage boys in tank tops and underweight girls in low-cut jeans spraying perfume on tourists.

“Prescott & Brower,” Klay said. “With the pith helmets.”

“Exactly. Change, move, or die, right, Tom? That’s evolution. No one knows evolution better than The Sovereign. So, I ask you, do you want to be right and dead like the dinosaurs? Or alive