The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  They settled at a brasserie table. In the middle of the crowded leafy square, a ten-piece band—teenagers—had just struck up a cacophony. The scene was reminiscent of the many Mexican cities where Kate had once loitered: the plaza ringed with cafés and tourist shops, all the generations of residents—from gurgling newborns through gossiping old ladies, clutching each other’s arms—gathered around a bandstand, the amateurs playing local favorites, badly.

  The long, far reach of European colonialism.

  Kate had spent the most time in Oaxaca’s zócalo, which was a half-mile east of her one-room apartment, next to the language school where she was taking private half-day advanced lessons, mastering dialects. She dressed herself as other women like her, in long linen skirts and peasant blouses, bandannas to tie up her hair, revealing a small—fake—butterfly tattoo at the base of her neck. She was blending in, hanging around cafés, drinking Negra Modelos, using a string bag to tote produce from the 20th of November market.

  One night, a few tables were pushed together, with a German couple and a few Americans plus the requisite young Mexican men who were always hitting on the women—they threw a lot of darts in the dark, these types, but every once in a while hit a bull’s-eye—when a good-looking, self-assured character asked if he could join them. Kate had seen him before, many times. She knew who he was; everyone did. His name was Lorenzo Romero.

  Up close, he was more handsome than she’d expected from his pictures. When it became clear that he was there to talk to Kate, she could barely contain her excitement. Her breath came short and shallow, her palms began to sweat. She had a hard time concentrating on the jokes and innuendo of his repartee, but it didn’t matter. She understood what was going on. She allowed her blouse to fall open. She touched his arm, for too long.

  She took a final sip of beer, steeling her nerves. Then she leaned toward him. “Cinqo minutos,” she said, and inclined her head toward the cathedral, at the north end of the square. He nodded his understanding, licked his lips, his eyes eager.

  The walk across the plaza lasted forever. All the little kids and their parents had gone home, leaving just the young adults and the old people and the tourists in the square, a mix of cigar smoke and marijuana, slangy drunken English, and the cackling of grandmothers. Under the trees, away from the streetlamps, couples were shamelessly groping.

  Kate couldn’t believe she was actually doing this. She waited impatiently on Independencia, alongside the cathedral, in the shadows. He arrived, and came in for a kiss.

  “No.” She shook her head. “No aquí.”

  They walked silently toward El Llano, the park where there used to be a zoo, now a derelict space, scary for Kate by herself. But she wasn’t. She smiled at Lorenzo, and walked into the darkness. He followed, a predator coming in for the kill.

  She took a deep, deep breath. This was it, finally. She turned around a thick tree trunk under a heavy canopy of leaves, and waited for him to follow, slipping her hand into the inside pocket of her loose-fitting canvas jacket.

  When he came around the tree trunk in the dark, she nuzzled the nozzle into his stomach and pulled the trigger twice before he had any idea what was happening. He fell limp to the ground. She fired once more, to the head, to be sure.

  Lorenzo Romero was the first man she’d ever killed.

  3

  “Have you seen her?” the Italian asked. “The new American?”

  Kate took a sip of her latte, and considered adding some sort of sweetener.

  She was having a hard time remembering if this Italian woman was named Sonia or Sophia or, in a one-of-these-things-does-not-belong type of way, Marcella. The only name she was confident in was the elegant British woman, Claire, who’d chatted for fifteen minutes but then disappeared.

  Plus it didn’t occur to Kate that this question could be directed at her, because she herself was the new American.

  As a way of underscoring her not-answering, Kate studiously looked around the items on the table, for coffee-sweetener options. There was a small ceramic container of white sugar cubes. There was a large glass pourer of brown sugar—or, rather, brownish sugar; this didn’t look like the stuff you use for baking brownies, which Kate had done exactly twice in her life, for school fund-raisers. There was a little steel pitcher of steamed milk, and a glass carafe of unsteamed.

  Kate had once been very good at remembering names; she’d once religiously employed mnemonic aids. But she’d now been out of practice for years.

  If only everyone could wear name tags, all the time.

  There was a squat hard-plastic container of cardboard coasters featuring a baroque coat-of-arms, with a lion and pennants and maybe snakes and a sun and a crescent moon, and stripes, and a castle turret, plus gothic lettering that she couldn’t make out because from where she sat it was upside down, this highly stylized thick black lettering. So she didn’t even know what language it was that she was unable to read.

  There was a steel napkin dispenser, the napkins themselves those little tri-folds that manage to be both flimsy and sturdy at the same time, which seems impossible, but is not. She’d recently found herself repeatedly wiping snot from Ben’s little nose with these tri-folds, which were everywhere; the kid had a cold. And she hadn’t come across those handy pocket packets of tissues that you can buy at virtually any genre of retailer in the States, in gas stations and convenience stores and supermarkets, in candy shops and newsstands and drugstores. The drugstores in Luxembourg apparently sold only drugs. If you asked for tissues—if you could ask for tissues—the stern-looking woman behind the counter would probably laugh at you. Or worse. They were very stern-looking, all the women behind all the counters.

  There was a white iPhone and a black iPhone and a blue BlackBerry. A Blueberry. Kate herself hadn’t yet gotten around to procuring a local cell, and despite earlier assurances to the contrary from the Mumbai customer representative of her service provider based in Colorado, there was no dialing code, no combination of digits, no change to network settings, no anything she could do that would enable her French-designed Taiwan-produced Virginia-procured mobile telephone to make or receive calls here, in Europe.

  It had been simpler when there had been other people to handle the tech aspects of her life.

  But what was apparently not on this table was artificial sweetener; there was never any artificial sweetener on any table.

  “Artificial sweetener” was not something she had learned how to say en français. In her mind, Kate formed a French sentence that was translated from “Is there a thing to put in coffee like sugar but different?” She was trying to remember if the word for sugar was masculine or feminine; the difference would change her pronunciation of the word for different. Or would it? With which noun should that adjective agree?

  Is different even an adjective?

  But “Is there a thing to put in coffee like sugar but different?” was, Kate feared, simply too retarded-sounding, so what the hell did it matter if she pronounced the final consonant sounds of different/differente? It didn’t.

  There was, of course, an ashtray on the table.

  “Kate?” The Italian was looking directly at her. “Have you seen her? The new Americana?”

  Kate was stunned to discover that she was the one being addressed. “No.”

  “I believe that the new American woman does not have children, or at least none who attend our school, or she is not the person who is bringing the children to school or collecting them,” piped up the Indian.

  “Correct,” said the other American at the table. Amber, maybe? Kelly? Something like that. “But she has a hot husband. The whole tall-dark-handsome thing. Right, Devi?”

  The Indian tittered, her hand covering her mouth, actually blushing. “Oh I do not know anything about his handsomeness or lack thereof, I can tell you that for certain.” Kate was impressed with how many words this woman used to communicate her ideas.

  She couldn’t help but wonder what these women had sai
d about her and Dexter, two weeks ago, when they’d arrived for the first day of school. She looked around the strange café-bar in the large low-ceilinged room in the basement of the sports center. Upstairs, the children were taking tennis lessons from English-speaking Swedish coaches named Nils and Magnus. One was very tall and the other medium-tall; both could be accurately described as tall blond Swedish tennis coaches. Apparently, all the tennis coaches here were Swedish. Sweden was six hundred miles away.

  They did this every Wednesday. Or they will do this every Wednesday. Or this was the second Wednesday they were doing this, with the plan that this is what they will do, on Wednesdays.

  Maybe there already was a routine, but she just didn’t recognize it yet.

  “Kate I apologize if I already asked this so please forgive me if it seems rude but I cannot remember if I asked: for how long are you planning to live in Luxembourg? ”

  Kate looked at her Indian interlocutor, then at the other American, then the Italian.

  “How long?” Kate asked herself for the hundredth time. “I have no idea.”

  “HOW LONG WILL you live in Luxembourg?” Adam had asked.

  Kate had been staring at herself in the mirror that covered a full wall of the windowless interrogation room—officially called a conference room, but everyone knew better—up on the sixth floor. She tucked a strand of wayward auburn hair behind her ear. Kate had always worn her hair short, as a matter of practicality, in fact a necessity when she’d traveled regularly. Even when she’d stopped going abroad, she was still a harried working mother, and short hair made sense. But it was generally difficult to schedule haircuts, so her hair was often at least a bit too long, and strands were always escaping. Like now.

  Her cheeks looked flabby. Kate was tall and slender—angular, is how someone once put it, not particularly generously but undeniably accurately—and she wasn’t one of those insane types who thought she was fat, or pretended to think it. The flab was just in her cheeks, an extra sag that meant she hadn’t been eating well or exercising enough, but probably didn’t amount to anything more than an excess pound, maybe two.

  Plus the bags under her gray-green eyes were more noticeable today, under these bright fluorescent lights. She’d been sleeping badly—awfully—and last night had been particularly disastrous. Kate looked like crap.

  She sighed. “I explained this already, two hours ago.”

  “Not to me,” Adam said. “So please, explain it again.”

  Kate crossed her long legs, ankles knocking against each other. Her legs had always been one of her best physical assets. She’d often wished for fuller breasts, or more of an hourglass figure. But in the end, she had to admit that shapely legs were probably the most practical choice among the bizarre body forms that men found attractive. Big boobs were clearly a pain in the ass, whereas the ass itself, if not small, had a tendency to droop into something absolutely dreadful in women her age who exercised as infrequently as she, and didn’t categorically deny themselves ice cream.

  Kate had never seen this Adam character before, a squared-off exmilitary type. But that was no surprise. Her company employed tens of thousands of people over the globe, with thousands in the D.C. area, scattered among who knows how many buildings. There would be a lot of people she’d never seen.

  “My husband’s contract is for one year. As I understand it, that’s pretty common.”

  “And after one year?”

  “We’ll hope he gets renewed. That too is a common expat circumstance.”

  “And what if his contract isn’t renewed?”

  She looked over Adam’s shoulder into the large two-way mirror, behind which, she knew, was an array of her superiors, watching her. “I don’t know.”

  “BOYS.”

  “But it was Jake. He—”

  “Boys.”

  “Mommy: Ben took my—”

  “Boys! Stop it! Right this second!”

  Then there was silence in the car, the stillness of the morning after a tornado has torn through, big old trees uprooted, branches down, roof shingles blown away. Kate took a deep, deep breath, trying to calm herself, relaxing her death grip on the steering wheel. It was the bickering that she really couldn’t stand.

  “Mommy, I have a new best friend,” Ben said, apropos of nothing, his voice light-filled and carefree. He didn’t care that he’d just been yelled at, fifteen seconds earlier. He didn’t hold a grudge against his mother.

  “That’s great! What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Of course not: little children know that it doesn’t matter what you call a rose.

  “At the roundabout, take the. Second. Exit. And enter. The motorway.” The GPS device spoke to Kate in an upper-class English accent. Telling her what to do.

  “Enter. The motorway,” mimicked Jake, in the backseat. “Enter. The motorway,” with a different inflection. “Enter. The motorway. Mommy, what’s a motorway?”

  There was a time when Kate had studied maps; she used to love maps. She could drive anywhere, her internal compass never wavering, her memory of the turns and directions impeccable. But with this Julie Andrews–esque GPS leading her by the hand through every swerve and dip in the road, she was freed from using her brain, from making her own effort. This thing was like a calculator: faster and easier, but debilitating.

  Kate had halfheartedly suggested that they could live without a GPS, but Dexter had been adamant. His sense of direction had never been good.

  “A motorway is a highway,” Kate said, in an extra-patient voice, trying to bury her outburst, to atone. The niceness of her little boys melted Kate’s heart, which in comparison seemed inhumanly cold. Her children made her ashamed of herself.

  The low-hanging sun momentarily blinded her as she glanced to the southwest, at the oncoming traffic in the roundabout.

  “Mommy, is this the motorway?”

  “No. We’ll be entering it, after the roundabout.”

  “Oh. Mommy, what’s a roundabout?”

  “A roundabout,” she said, “is a traffic circle.”

  She hated roundabouts, which seemed like an open invitation to sideways collisions. Plus they were semi-anarchic. Plus she felt like she was constantly swinging her children out of their car seats, as well as dumping over the grocery bags in the trunk. Plunk, and there went all the vegetables, the cherry tomatoes rolling around, the apples getting bruised.

  In Latin America, the roads had been abysmal, the driving habits lethal. But she’d never had her children in the backseat.

  “Mommy, what’s a traffic circle?”

  They were everywhere, traffic circles, a new universal. Along with the window levers that were exactly the same, wherever she went. And the toilet flushes that were all built into the walls above the toilets. And the broad light switches, and the wrought-iron banisters, and the highly polished stone-tile floors.… Every fixture and finish seemed to have been granted to builders on an exclusive basis, monopolies by fiat.

  “This is,” she said, trying not to become exasperated with all the boy’s questions. “This is a traffic circle, sweetie. And here in Luxembourg they call it a roundabout.”

  What do you do with children, all the time? In Washington, she’d had charge of the kids on weekends; preschools and the nanny had borne the brunt of the day-to-day child-care responsibilities. She’d wanted more time with the kids, then.

  But now? Now it was every day after school, every evening, every night, every morning, and all weekend long. How was anyone supposed to amuse them, without spending her life lying on the floor, playing with Lego? Without the kids killing each other, or making an unbearable mess, or driving her crazy?

  Now that she had what she’d wanted, she was having her doubts. Which had been her worst fear about this whole thing.

  “Mommy, is this the motorway?”

  “Yes, sweetie. This is the motorway.”

  The dashboard began to blink. The onboard computer regularly sent her m
essages in German, tremendously long words, sometimes blinking, that she struggled to ignore. It was just a rental; they hadn’t yet tackled the task of buying a car.

  “Mommy?”

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “I need to poop.”

  She glanced at the GPS: two kilometers more. “We’ll be home in a few minutes.”

  The motorway ended and she was on a street beside the rail yard, side-by-side idle high-speed trains, then past the station’s clock tower, in the heart of the Gare district. Now she knew where she was going. She turned off the GPS, kicking out the crutch. The only way to learn.

  “YOUR HUSBAND WORKED there for four years before he joined the bank?” Adam hadn’t looked up from his notepad, his pen poised.

  “That’s correct.”

  “He left one year before the IPO.”

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t seem to be particularly, um, intelligent timing.”

  “Dexter has never been much of a financial strategist.”

  “Apparently not. So then at this bank. He did what, exactly?”

  “He worked in systems security. His job was to figure out how people might try to breach the system, and prevent it.”

  “What system?”

  “The accounts. He was protecting the accounts.”

  “The money.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Adam looked dubious. Kate knew that he was—they all were—suspicious of Dexter and this move to Luxembourg. But Kate wasn’t. She’d done her homework long ago, and Dexter was above suspicion. That’s why she’d let herself marry him.

  But of course they wouldn’t know that. Of course they should be suspicious. Maybe even she should be suspicious too. But long ago she’d promised herself that she wouldn’t be.

  “Do you know much about this type of work?” Adam asked.

  “Practically nothing.”

  Adam stared at her, waiting for more of an explanation. But she didn’t particularly want to give one, not aloud. She didn’t even want to spell it out for herself, in her mind. The fundamental truth was that she didn’t want to understand Dexter’s world, because she didn’t want him to understand hers. Quid pro quo.