The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

“That does sound like college,” Dexter said. “But that’s not my life. I spend my days staring at a screen, alone.” He cupped a handful of water to wash away his toothpaste-foam; he was a neat and clean man, a considerate roommate. “Not chatting up new friends.”

  Kate too spit, rinsed.

  “Do you know that today,” Dexter continued, “I literally did not talk to anyone? Except to order my sandwich at a bakery. Un petit pain jambon-fromage, merci. That’s what I said.” He repeated the sentence, ticking off with his fingers. “Ten syllables. To a stranger.”

  Kate too was still friendless. She knew the names of people, but she wouldn’t call any of them a legitimate friend. Now that Dexter had laid his superior loneliness on the table, though, she’d feel ridiculous to do the same. “I had lunch with a woman today,” she said. “Julia. We kind of got set up, on a blind date.”

  Kate returned the tube of under-eye moisturizer to the cabinet, next to a purely decorative crystal bottle of perfume. The last time she’d worn a scent had been in college, a tiny bottle given by an aspiring boyfriend as a Valentine’s present. But perfumes were habitually eschewed in her line of work; they were noticeable, identifiable, memorable, traceable. All the things you didn’t want to be.

  “Get this: she’s from Chicago.”

  Dexter caught Kate’s eye in the mirror. “Are you sure you can be friends with her, Kat?” He never passed up an opportunity with this joke, though this time he didn’t seem to be taking his customary glee in it. The joke, like most of his kisses, had become perfunctory.

  “I’ll give it my best.” She sniffed the perfume bottle—this one a Valentine’s Day present from a husband. Maybe she’d start wearing this, now that she could. “But Dexter?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Could you please stop calling me Kat? Or Katherine? I want to be Kate, here.”

  “Sorry, I keep forgetting.” He kissed her lips, minty clean. “It’s going to take me some time to get used to my new wife.”

  But this kiss was not perfunctory. He dropped his hand to her waist, the elastic band of her underpants. “Chicago, huh?” He chuckled, then moved his lips to her neck, and his hand to her thigh.

  Much later, Kate realized that Chicago should have been her first clue.

  WHY HAD SHE never admitted the truth to Dexter?

  At the beginning of their relationship, obviously, it would have been ridiculous to tell him anything. It wouldn’t have made any sense at least until they were married. But then?

  She looked over at him, a book in his lap, as ever. Dexter was a voracious reader—technical magazines and banking journals and serious nonfiction and, bewilderingly, a type of quiet English mystery novel that Kate thought of as women’s fiction. There was always a tall pile at his bedside, his only mess in an otherwise neat, orderly existence.

  What was the thing that made her maintain this secret? After they were married, after they had kids? Even after she stopped being an operations officer?

  It couldn’t have been solely protocol, although protocol wasn’t completely dismissible. Could it have been as simple as not wanting to admit that she’d been a liar for so very long? The longer she’d gone without admitting the truth, the worse it became when she contemplated the conversation. “Dexter,” she’d say, “I have something to tell you.” God, it would be horrible.

  Also, she didn’t want to admit to Dexter the things she’d done, the types of acts she’d been—still was—capable of. If she couldn’t tell him the whole truth, she was loath to tell any of it. That seemed worse. And since the worst of it was that morning in New York, which was also the reason for the end of it all, her story wouldn’t be complete—it wouldn’t make sense—without explaining that event. And her story wouldn’t be defensible with it.

  Plus she had to admit that a small part of her secrecy was that she was holding something back, for herself. If she never told Dexter the truth, she was still reserving the right to return to her old life. To one day be a covert operative again. To be a person who could keep the largest secrets from everyone, including her husband, forever.

  KATE HAD REPORTED to the hotel suite in Penn Quarter at nine A.M., as ordered. She’d taken a seat in front of a yellow legal pad, a Bic pen, and a sympathetic-looking middle-aged man named Evan, who for the next eight hours patiently quizzed her on every operation she’d ever participated in, every asset she’d ever run, every loose end she could’ve left untied.

  She’d been doing this for nearly three full days when Evan asked, “What about Sarajevo?” They’d already talked through anything she may have failed to get into her mission notes—locations of offices, names of attachés, descriptions of girlfriends. Then they’d moved on to lesser events. Her earliest training missions in Europe: making a drop in a converted palazzo near the Piazza Navona; an overture to a Basque nationalist in Bilbao; following a cash-mule through the cobblestoned streets and private banks of Luxembourg.

  And now apparently they’d be discussing nonevents. “I’ve never been to Sarajevo,” she answered.

  “Not once?”

  “No.”

  “But your husband has. Recently.” Evan looked up from his own yellow pad, filled with scribbles and underlines, big X’s and arrows. “Why?”

  Nobody wants to admit to being ignorant of a spouse’s comings and goings, habits and proclivities. Kate didn’t want to talk about Dexter’s trips abroad. She couldn’t see how they were at all relevant to her career.

  “I don’t know,” she said, trying to sound—trying to be—dismissive.

  “Work.”

  MAIL STARTED TO arrive; the address change and mail forwarding had kicked in. Kate opened an envelope from the U.S. government, a check to compensate her for unused vacation; she’d need to send this slip of paper back across the ocean to deposit the dollars. The fully executed lease for their D.C. house, finally, which they unfortunately were renting for slightly less than their mortgage payment. Some junk mail: a suburban Virginia health-club pitch, a solicitation for a book club—did book clubs really still exist?

  There had still not been any mail from Dexter’s bank, from which she was hoping to learn his employer. But there probably shouldn’t be: he was an independent contractor, not an employee. He had an office address where he’d receive business-to-business correspondence. She was mildly suspicious—who wouldn’t be?—but reminded herself, once again, of her own private clause in their wedding vows: to never investigate her husband.

  Because of course she’d investigated Dexter, before they were married. Exhaustively, and more than once. The first time had been right after they’d met, at the Dupont Circle farmers’ market, both reaching across a box of produce from opposite sides. It was a beautiful summer morning, a friendly time of day; both of them were on natural endorphin highs from early-morning exercise—this was back when Dexter was a runner, and Kate biked regularly, a short-lived passion—so they were both uncharacteristically outgoing. They went for coffee at the bookstore up the street, laden with bags of fruits and vegetables, on their way to their apartments, which turned out to be just a few blocks apart. It was a wholesome meeting; almost too wholesome.

  Kate wondered if it was a setup. She sat at her computer in the bay window on the top floor of the yellow-brick house, amid the muffled sounds of the newborn crying in the apartment downstairs. She logged onto the secure server and perused the various Dexter Moores of America until she identified the one who interested her. She followed the trail of his Social Security number across one database after another, college and the District’s DMV and the Arkansas Department of Education, his father’s police record—aggravated assault in Memphis—and his older brother’s military history, killed in Bosnia.

  After an hour, she was satisfied: this Dexter Moore was an upstanding citizen. She picked up the telephone and dialed, and asked him to the movies. Later in the week, she’d be leaving town for a month—maybe more—in Guatemala, most of it up north in the jungle.

  Two
years later she delved even deeper, pulling phone records and bank statements, surreptitiously capturing a full set of fingerprints that she used to check against the CIA’s database. She confirmed again that Dexter was who he claimed to be, perfectly straightforward and undeniably respectable.

  She’d already said yes.

  That was six years ago. That was when she’d been able to suspend her normal state of disbelief about people, to renew her faith in life’s innocence. A faith she’d lost far earlier, in her teens, with the onset of her family’s string of disasters.

  So then she’d believed—she’d wanted to believe, she’d needed to believe—that she could put aside her cynicism to marry this man, to lead a semblance of a normal life. After she’d investigated him to her full satisfaction, she promised herself that she’d never do it again.

  She realized, even at the time, that this may have been an act of willful ignorance; she may have conspired to deceive herself, all these years.

  “Ben,” she said, flagging down her youngest as he ran on his way to emergency-play.

  “What?”

  “Come here.” She opened her arms, and the boy leaned in, wrapped his wiry arms around her thighs. “I love you,” she said.

  “Me too Mommy but I have to go now so bye-bye I love you bye-bye.”

  It may have been self-deception. But it was what she’d needed, to get this.

  KATE COULDN’T HELP herself. She rifled through the file cabinet, thumbing quickly through credit-card statements and insurance policies and old utility bills. Nothing. Then she took another pass, slower, removing one file at a time from the top drawer, paging through every piece of paper, fanning out the user’s manuals to routers and external drives and a stereo system that she knew for certain had been left behind in Washington.

  She poured herself a fresh cup of coffee, and returned to the bottom drawer, starting at the rear. She came across an old manila file with a creased and torn tab that read MORTGAGE REFINANCE. Inside, behind the uniform residential loan application and in front of the verification of assets, she finally found it: a bare-bones contract for services between Dexter Moore and the Continental European Bank.

  Kate read through the two pages’ worth of legalese, twice. There was absolutely nothing remarkable.

  Briefly, she was angry with Dexter for hiding the contract from her. But of course this is what he would have to do, if he wanted to keep the bank’s identity from her.

  So she forgave him. And instead she berated herself for her suspicion, for her snooping. For the things she promised herself she wouldn’t do, the feelings she wouldn’t have.

  Then she forgave herself also, and went to school, to pick up the children.

  “MY PARENTS,” KATE said, “are both dead. We—my sister and I—buried them in back-to-back years.”

  “My God,” Julia said. “Where’s your sister now?”

  “Hartford, I think. Maybe New London. We’re not in touch.”

  “Big fight?”

  “Not exactly,” Kate said. “Emily is a drunk. Usually a junkie too.”

  “Yikes.”

  “When my parents were ill, there wasn’t a lot of attention to go around. Or for that matter money. My parents were too young for Medicare, and my dad’s plant had closed—an electronics manufacturer—so they both had part-time jobs, inadequate or nonexistent health insurance, when they got sick. They were screwed. It was inhumane, how they were treated.”

  “Is that why you’ve moved abroad?”

  “No. We’re here for the experience. But I guess I do carry some resentment. Or I don’t know if resentment is right. Disappointment? Don’t get me wrong: I love America. But not everything about it. So my sister, she slipped through the cracks of the disaster of our family. She became her own disaster.”

  While Emily lost herself in alcohol and drugs, Kate buried herself in a tomb of numbness, unattached and unattachable, a lonely workaholic. She also began to develop one of the roles that would define her adulthood: martyr. The primary caregiver and a crucial wage-earner and the person who did the housework. The sacrifices; the suffering. Kate had never realized, until its disappearance, that she’d relished that facet of herself.

  “Eventually, I had to give up caring about Emily. She was beyond helping.”

  “How do you stop talking to your sister?”

  “She was never good about staying in touch. So once both our parents had died, and we weren’t close to any of the extended family, we didn’t need to communicate about anything. It was easy for me to simply stop calling her.”

  This was not true. Kate had diligently stayed in touch with Emily for years after their parents were dead, all throughout Kate’s college and Emily’s slow descent into destitution. But when Kate joined the Company, maintaining a relationship with Emily became not just a personal trial but a professional handicap. A liability that could be used against her. Kate knew she had to rid herself of the compassion that she’d held on to, needed to strip it away, like ripped and soiled clothing, beyond cleaning or repair, directly into the trash.

  She heard from Emily a few times over that first CIA year, messages that went unreturned. Then not again for a half-decade, when Emily needed to be bailed out of jail. But Kate, in El Salvador, couldn’t help. When she returned to the States, she wouldn’t.

  “So then Dexter’s family,” Kate continued. “His mother, Louise, is dead, and his father has remarried a dreadful woman. His brother, also, is dead.”

  “His brother? How awful.”

  “His name was Daniel. He was a lot older than Dexter; he’d been born when Andre and Louise were just children, really. Daniel ended up joining the Marines, in the late eighties. A few years later, he found himself out of the Marines, officially, and in the Balkans, unofficially, as one of those so-called military advisers, who we’ve now renamed private contractors. But same as it ever was, Daniel was a mercenary.”

  “Wow.”

  “His body was found in an alley in Dubrovnik.”

  “My God,” Julia said flatly. She seemed surprisingly unsurprised; or conversely she was so shocked she was stunned into numbness. Kate couldn’t tell which.

  “Yes. So anyway”—shifting gears—“that was probably much more of a long-winded answer than you bargained for to the question ‘Do you miss your family?’ ”

  AFTER KATE UNBURDENED her family saga, Julia told Kate the story of her meeting Bill. She’d been donating her design services to the silent auction portion of a fund-raiser, trying to kill a whole flock of birds—charity, networking, client-attracting, socializing—with one stone. And Bill was doing what young finance guys habitually did, which was spending excessive amounts of money on trying to attract the right type of woman, aka an unmarried socialite, which was the breed of twenty-something female that tended to populate five-hundred-dollar-a-head cocktail parties that benefited prep-school scholarships for inner-city kids.

  Bill assumed that Julia was one such woman. By the time she disabused him of his misconception, three hours later, they were naked. This was a state of affairs that Julia had expedited, because she couldn’t believe her great good fortune at having this incredibly handsome man interested in her.

  “And over the years,” she said, “I’ve discovered that men find me much more interesting when I’m naked.” Kate could tell that Julia wasn’t joking.

  They pulled into the packed parking lot in front of the gargantuan store Cactus. The women sprinted through the punishing rain, then caught their breath under the overhang.

  “Darn.” Julia was rummaging around in her purse. “I must’ve left my phone in your car,” Julia said. “May I go get it?”

  “I’ll come with you,” Kate said.

  “Oh no. This rain is too horrible. You go inside. I’ll run back.”

  Kate picked her car keys out of her bag. “Be my guest.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kate glanced out over the parking lot, the main road, the wet grimness of the suburb, the
hulking mass of concrete filled with stores filled with shelves filled with crap that she shouldn’t want, or buy. This outing was a mistake. They should have done something else. Coffee somewhere, or sightseeing in Germany, or lunch in France. Mini-travel.

  Travel was becoming Kate’s avocation. She had started researching the family’s next trips as soon as they’d returned from Copenhagen, which had been their first long weekend away. This upcoming weekend would be a drive to Paris.

  “Thanks,” Julia said, shaking water from her umbrella. She handed over Kate’s keys with a small inscrutable smile.

  TODAY, 11:02 A.M.

  Kate makes it to the corner and around it, into the rue de Seine, out of sight from the rue Jacob and anyone there who might be watching her, before she allows herself to pause, to stop walking, to release the breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding, sinking deeper into thought, into contingencies. Into panic.

  They’d been living in Paris for a year, unremarkably, unostentatiously, attracting no attention, no suspicion. They should be in the clear.

  So why would this woman be here, now?

  The mounting anxiety forces Kate to stop moving, distracted, in the archway of a pair of immense wooden doors. One of the doors creaks open, pushed by a tiny, decrepit woman wearing an impeccable bouclé suit and carrying a cane. She stares at Kate in that bold way that old French women seem to have invented.

  “Bonjour!” the old broad suddenly screams, and Kate almost falls over.

  “Bonjour,” Kate answers. She can see past the woman, to the bright, leafy courtyard at the other end of the dark breezeway whose walls are filled with mailboxes and electrical junctions and rubbish bins and loose wires and chained-up bicycles. Her own building has a similar passage; there are thousands of them in Paris. All competing for the best-place-to-kill-someone award.

  Kate resumes walking, lost in thought. She stops again at the large windows of an art gallery. Contemporary photography. She watches the reflections of the passersby in the windows, mostly women who are dressed like her, and the men who form matched sets. Also a gaggle of German tourists in their sandals and socks, a trio of American youth in their backpacks and tattoos.