Paul Batista
The Borzoi Killings
© 2014
To my sister, Susan Becker,
and the memory of our beloved parents.
1.
Brad Richardson’s office at the estate was a light-filled room lined with glass walls overlooking the lawn that led to the dunes. Whenever he stood, he saw the Atlantic Ocean over the low, reedy expanse of Egypt Beach and the silver crests of the waves collapsing onto the shore.
He loved the office, as he loved the sprawling house itself, in late October when the trees started to change colors and the lawn, no matter how well-watered and tended by Juan Suarez, stopped growing. Around the house were the flat potato and corn fields that had dominated this whole area when he was a boy and his parents owned a saltbox summer house on Main Street in East Hampton. Now, even all these years later, large tracts of farmland were still here near the Atlantic shore, along with some new houses, all large, rising out of the distant fields.
The house was quiet on this Tuesday morning. His wife Joan was in the city at their Fifth Avenue apartment, Juan had the day off as he did every Tuesday, and Brad had told the cooks not to bother coming to work since he intended to go into East Hampton and pick up food for lunch. He looked forward to driving on the village’s broad Main Street lined by ancient trees and stately houses. In October the famous village was largely empty; the restless crowds of the summer were gone; and on this day, under a flawless autumn sky, it was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
Brad also looked forward to a quick tour of the new construction at the public library on Main Street. He and Joan had donated several million dollars to the renovation of the cozy seventy-five-year-old building. The outer shell of the library- the tasteful framework of walls and roof-was preserved by the restoration of the original exterior brick, wood, and shingles. But the interior was gutted, and beautifully crafted rooms, shelves, and floors were being installed. Ultimately the names of Joan and Brad Richardson would appear on a discreet marble plaque over the new fireplace.
He visited the construction site each week. He made an effort to learn the names of most of the carpenters, masons, and plumbers. They knew him. Brad Richardson was, after all, one of the richest men in the world, ranked tenth on the Forbes list of the wealthiest Americans. He was slender, likable, engaging. One of the organizers of the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, he had that rare gift of making other people feel comfortable and respected. Some of the workers at the construction site called him Brad.
Not only did the quiet of his Tuesday world soothe him, but he still managed to feel that rush of pleasure like a drug whenever he stayed ahead of the European and Asian stock markets. Years earlier, when he came into the world of finance, even a hundred-dollar gain on a trade made him giddy. Now, when the numbers involved were infinitely larger, a sensation like euphoria, but quieter, more secure, still came over him. He had heard serious marathon runners talk about the body’s soothing reaction to the endorphins their bodies released during the 26.2-mile race. A day’s success in trading flooded him with “endorphins,” as he would say, “even though I don’t know whether there really is such a thing as an endorphin. I’m the only guy in history ever to flunk Biology 101, the legendary gut course, at Harvard.”
Brad was a dedicated, powerful swimmer. As on most Tuesdays from late April through late October, he left the house at noon and walked barefooted over the lush lawn to the dunes and Egypt Beach, the southern border of his property. He wore a bathing suit and a loose-fitting white bathrobe. Sunlight glittered on the vast expanse of the Atlantic.
The dogs-Felix and Sylvia, fawn-colored, almost mirror images of one another-kept pace with him as he ran across the deserted beach, shedding his bathrobe. The Borzois, too, were powerful swimmers, and they plunged into the waves with the same grace, speed, and skill as Brad.
After ten minutes of intense swimming, he rolled onto his back. He stretched out, his arms spread. His face was in the benign sunlight. Near him floated the dogs, sleek as eels. Sometimes in the gentle swell of the waves their warm bodies touched his.
Brad Richardson’s world was utterly quiet now. The ocean waters sustained him. The sky was pure blue. Three seagulls, far overhead, wings open, were suspended on some invisible flow of wind. And, above the dazzling white birds, parallel contrails from two invisible jets spanned the upper atmosphere for miles and miles.
Sun, air, water: Brad Richardson had the sense that he had lived for thousands of years. And that he had thousands more ahead of him.
Just as he was deciding to end his day at four (it was late in Europe, early the next day in Hong Kong), Brad Richardson found himself doing something he had always vowed not to do because he thought it was pretentious: he talked into two cell phones at once, seamlessly handling the information he received in Japanese and French and responding fluently in both languages. He stared through the panes of glass toward the ocean. Sylvia and Felix, still tired from their ocean swim, slept in the warmth of the sunlight near the glass doors.
Brad heard footsteps behind him. Somewhat surprised at the sight of the man casually approaching him, he said, “Be with you in a second.” He was too distracted to smile.
The Borzois rose to their feet. Normally edgy, they walked together in the direction of the man in the yellow raincoat. Their hard nails clicked on the floor. As Brad gradually brought his dual conversations to an end, he thought that it must have started raining because the man wore not only the raincoat but knee-high green boots as well. Brad turned again in his old banker’s swivel chair to look at the lawn and the dunes. There was no rain.
Brad wore a collarless sweater. The freckled back of his neck was exposed. The man in the rain slicker, focusing on the middle of Brad’s neck, swung a machete as if it were a baseball bat, striking that vulnerable area of the neck. It was a flawlessly directed swing.
Making a sound like a human wail of grief, cowering, Sylvia and Felix moved closer to the man in the raincoat as if looking for safety. Two perfectly executed, back-to-back strokes from the machete struck both dogs. The bodies of the Borzois still quivered powerfully, uncontrollably, as he left the light-filled room.
2.
His real name wasn’t Juan. It was Anibal. When he casually mentioned that to Joan Richardson as they drank iced tea during one of his work breaks, she said, “Really? I’ve never heard of that name.” She wore a white tennis visor that shaded her eyes and nose. Her intensely blue eyes glinted in the visor’s shadow. “It sounds Arabic, doesn’t it?”
Juan wasn’t sure he understood the word “Arabic.” He said, “Not to worry about it, Mrs. Richardson. I like Juan better.”
Three months earlier, in late spring, she’d made him indispensable to the way she and Brad Richardson lived. Their gray-shingled, twenty-room house on the ocean at Egypt Beach near the understated and elegant Maidstone Club offered up endless projects on which Juan could work.
Juan was bright. He was a gifted mason. There was a complex weaving of New England-style stone walls throughout the two acre estate. Juan could make the brick and the stone pristine again after the steady erosion from seasons of ocean winds and rains, snow and late winter fogs, as well as the dry days of hot sunlight in June, July, August, and September.
He was also a skilled gardener. The house the Richardsons called the Bonac was built in 1925 by a branch of the Vanderbilt family. Unlike the gaudy and overblown homes of the newly wealthy investment bankers, the house had gardens that were carefully designed and planted decades earlier. Juan knew the secrets of restoring and maintaining a garden’s freshness, symmetry, and style. He was a plumber, too. And he could easily control the crafty, childlike play of the bizarre floating machine that devoured and neutralized the algae that sometimes floated on the glinting surface of the Olympic-size pool.