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

family keeps. Balls the size of grapefruit blowing in the wind. Right?”

“Right,” Tenchant said.

“So, I’m hanging up and Porfle says, ‘Don’t forget to give me the bull balls.’

“I ask what does he mean. He says, ‘The Sufferin’ needs to grow some of its own.’ Says he wants the ‘balls blowing in the wind,’ just like I said it. Because it’s Porfle, I ask him directly, ‘You want the whole balls as big as grapefruits . . . in the story?’ He starts shouting he’s the goddamned editor, leave it to Tweedledee to take it out. ‘We’ll test their mettle,’ he’s yelling. You know how he is.”

Tenchant sipped his drink. “Uh-huh.”

“So, that’s what I did. I wrote it up with balls as big as grapefruit blowing in the wind. It was completely irrelevant to the story. When he got my first draft, he said it’s about time the bloody Sovereign wrote with brio.” Klay shook his head.

“He hates you,” Tenchant said.

“No, he doesn’t.”

Tenchant shrugged.

“Hates?” Klay asked. “Really?”

“What did you think?”

“I don’t know. I figured he was a little hostile. He sits at a desk and I run around the world. I’m no fan of his, but he hates me?”

“Says you’re an arrogant prick.”

“Does he?” Klay said, narrowing his eyes. “Okay. Well, then, I’m glad we had this little chat.”

“Aw, come on. Tell me the rest. I’m the one that ends up paying for this, you know.”

Klay took a drink. “All right. So the first draft comes back. Porfle writes ‘balls size of grapefruit blowing in wind’ would be better as ‘testicles like grapefruit blowing in the wind.’ I say okay. Then I get another email marked urgent. ‘Urgent! Tom, worried about testicles in wind. Please respond ASAP!’ I write him back. He wants to know was there actually a wind on that day and was it strong enough to move such large balls? Or, ‘more likely, were they not in fact swinging because of the bull’s gait? Possibly there was only a breeze,’ he writes me. ‘So, not blowing.’

“I turn in my draft, he writes in the margin, ‘Tom, there are several varieties of grapefruit and we don’t know which one you’re referring to.’ He asks me to be more specific, ‘as with navel oranges, for example.’”

“Yeah,” Tenchant said. “We’d just done that evolution-of-citrus story. I asked him if he wanted a specific variety for your story. I didn’t know it would become a thing. I just—”

“So, I write back, ‘Readers know grapefruits vary in size. The point is they were unusually large fucking balls, which “grapefruit” connotes.’ I say navel oranges might be familiar to readers, but the balls on the bull I saw were definitely larger than navel oranges, which is why I called them grapefruits.”

“That’s probably when he called me to his office,” Tenchant said. “Er, cubicle now.”

“Cubicle?”

“Sharon’s moving the magazine staff into cubicles.”

“That’s going to suck for you,” Klay said.

“You, too. Don’t you read your emails?”

“Fuuuck.” Klay sighed. For a moment he’d forgotten this was his last assignment. He wasn’t going back to the magazine. You’re quitting, remember?

Tenchant said, “So, I walk into Porfle’s office, and he’s on the phone. He points at your manuscript with his pencil. ‘Check into this,’ he mouths to me.”

“Check into grapefruit?”

“Yeah,” Tenchant said. “So, I start researching grapefruit. It was pretty interesting. The American grapefruit started out in Malaysia. Spanish missionaries brought pomelos over here, and grapefruits grew out of that. The originals were all white. Then one day this Texas farmer finds a red one. It’s sweeter than the white ones. Americans go crazy for them. All of a sudden, grapefruit farmers start making money—this is the Great Depression. They patent a version and call it Ruby Red. It’s sweet and dark red. They make it the Texas state fruit.”

“Fascinating.” Klay sighed.

“Yeah. I thought so. Then one year there’s a huge storm and all the Ruby Reds fade to pink. Taste just as good, but the growers have this big ad campaign going about how delicious an apple-red grapefruit is, and now they’re gone . . .”

Klay told himself to stay engaged in Tenchant’s story. Teamwork, he reminded himself, might be important on this trip.

“So, this scientist in Texas named Henks—or Hacks? He packs up three thousand grapefruit buds, flies them to the Brookhaven nuclear lab on Long Island, stuffs the branches into a nuclear reactor, and fucking nukes them with thermal neutrons.”

“Is that true?”

Tenchant laughed. “He grafts irradiated buds onto healthy rootstock, comes up with something five times redder than the Ruby Red. You know what they call it?”

“No.”

“Me, neither. I mean, I forget what it was. I never fucking wanted to know any of this. But that’s what I get paid for: to figure out what variety of grapefruit could possibly swing between a bull’s—Rio Reds! That’s what they called them. It goes on and on for weeks like this with Porfle trying to decide which reference to use. Maggie and I stop eating grapefruit. I can’t stand looking at them.”

“You were Porfled,” Klay said.

“I was Porfled!”

Klay was pleased. He and Tenchant were laughing together. His little bonding mission had been a success. It was the most basic spycraft: nothing brings people together better than a common adversary.

“So, in the end, the sentence Porfle came up with—and God help me—I agreed to it—was—”

“Wait,” Tenchant said. “Wait! I remember it verbatim because it came back to me to fact-check. The final sentence was ‘A bovine, probably of the zebu or Sanga variety, with prominent male features walked in front of me.’”

“Which . . .” Klay prodded.

“Tweedledee excised.”

“Circumcised.”

“Castrated.”

“So that’s the grapefruit story,” Klay said. After a moment, he leaned forward. “So, Tench, one tip I can offer before we get into this is, no matter what the data looks like, drill down to find individuals. If you start to get distracted, keep in mind there’s always a who. If you get off track, or the information seems overwhelming, come back to that, okay?”

“‘There’s always a who’?” Tenchant echoed.

“Yeah. You know, I find it helps me.”

“Okay. Thanks, Tom. Yeah. I