The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

Kate blinked, long and slow, letting her eyes stay closed for a few loud techno beats. Julia glided away, was dancing with a tall, dangerously thin young man, her lips moist and partway open, teeth glinting, tongue sliding slowly across her lip. One of Julia’s hands was resting against the flat of her stomach, then this hand rose to her breast, cupping herself, then fell again, past stomach and down to hip, thigh. Her head was thrown back, extending her glistening neck; her eyes were hooded, open but barely, looking not at the man she was dancing with, but across the room, and not in the direction of her own disappeared husband, but in the direction, Kate knew without turning, of Dexter.

  It was three thirty in the morning.

  THE BOULEVARD DESERTED of muscular bouncers and nubile girls, not a taxi nor a person in sight, but suddenly out of nowhere there were two of them, hoodies and baggy jeans and piercings and scraggly beards. One shoving Dexter hard against the wall. The other with the quick, unmistakable movement of a flustered young man raising a gun.

  Kate could replay the next couple of seconds frame by frame, stop-motion, in her mind. There was Dexter’s panicked face, and Julia’s frozen horror, and Bill’s impressive, impassive calm. “Je vous en prie,” he said. “Un moment.”

  Kate was off to the side of the main confrontation, ignored. It would be easy for her. The path she could take to end this scene was clear: the swift kick to the side of the head, the rabbit punch to the kidney, then wresting away the weapon. But if Kate did this, then everyone would wonder how the hell she had the nerve, and the technique, and she wouldn’t be able to explain.

  So Kate turned her thoughts to whether she’d miss anything she was about to hand over to these thugs. Muggers don’t shoot tourists on central-Paris streets, do they? No.

  But then the odd thing happened. Bill took hold of Julia’s handbag, and extended it toward the gun-wielder. This was clearly not how these boys wanted the transaction to proceed, both shaking their heads.

  “Tenez,” Bill said. Kate could see that he knew what he was doing, and why, pushing the bag toward the weapon, getting too close, forcing the other man to step between Bill and the bullets to grasp the booty, which was when Bill lunged into the unarmed man, using him as a shield while he reached out and yanked the barrel of the gun, effortlessly, brazenly.

  Everyone froze for a beat, cutting their eyes from the weapon to one another, heavy breathing, mouths agape, calculating their next possible actions …

  The young men ran away, and Bill tossed the gun into the gutter.

  8

  Monday afternoon, and it was pouring.

  Kate stood alone in front of the school, resting her umbrella so low that her head was touching the striped nylon, the aluminum ribs sitting on her shoulder, trying to safeguard the few undrenched portions of her body. Everything below the waist was soaked, squishing, unsalvageable.

  Sheets of big, heavy drops were flooding from the dark, dense sky, pounding the concrete, thrumming the grass, loudly splattering in the deep puddles that had pooled in every dip or swale, crack or crevasse.

  The mother groups were neatly divided by nationality. There were the self-sufficient groups of blue-eyed Danes and blond Dutch, of high-heel-wearing Italians and ultra-healthy Swedes. The intermingled English-language groups dominated by pale Brits, with chunky Americans and ever-smiling Australians and aggressively friendly Kiwis, the occasional Irish and Scot. There were the hyper-insular Indians, and the utterly unapproachable Japanese. Individual roving Russians and Czechs and Poles, hoping to attach themselves to Western Europe, ingratiating, firm-handshaking, trying to get invited to join the EU, ignorant—willfully?—of the universal futility of trying to get invited to anything, ever.

  There were even a few men scattered around, not talking to one another, each in his own independent orbit of strangeness.

  Technically, Kate was no longer hungover from Saturday night. But she was still physically tired from the lack of sleep—the children had awoken at seven A.M. on Sunday, oblivious to their parents’ late night—and her body still felt nonspecifically wrong.

  She also felt a psychic unease, partially attached to what she may have witnessed of Bill’s infidelity, partially to Julia’s inappropriate exhibitionism aimed at Dexter. Partially to Bill’s heroic behavior—overly heroic?—in the face of muggers. And partially to her own desperation, back at the hotel, in the bathroom, the door locked against any sleepwalking children, descending famished on Dexter, begging him for more, harder, while uncontrollable images flitted through her imagination, of people who were not her husband, and sometimes not herself, their slickened bodies, their lips and tongues …

  It was now raining even harder. She wouldn’t have guessed that was possible.

  Kate couldn’t put her finger on exactly what had happened to the four of them, late on Saturday night in Paris, and whether it was good, or bad, or both.

  “LISTEN,” DEXTER SAID, “I’m going to be late tonight.” Again.

  Kate and the boys had changed out of their wet things, into soft sweats and slippers, enfolded in fleece. But she was still having a hard time shaking the chill of the latest in a long series of drenchings. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to play tennis. With Bill.”

  They hadn’t said a word about Julia and Bill since they got into separate taxis at four thirty in the morning on the avenue George V, four days ago.

  “He has an abonnement for a court at a club, and his regular partner canceled.”

  An image ran across her brain, Bill shirtless in the locker room, unbuckling his belt, pushing down his …

  Kate deposited the phone in its cradle, next to the laptop, facing onto the usually majestic view, which was now a vast expanse of cloud and fog and rain against the browns and grays of the leafless trees, the slates and blacks of the stone roofs, the beiges and tans of the stone fortifications and rock outcroppings and cobblestone streets.

  It was dreary, and she was alone again, back from another Wednesday afternoon in the windowless basement of the sports center at Kockelscheuer, talking about bikini waxes. She used to be a person who did things. Not just run-of-the-mill normal-job things, but life-and-death things. Illegally crossing international borders. Eluding police. Hiring assassins, for God’s sake. Now she was folding laundry. Could her life really have become this?

  “When is Daddy coming home?” Jake asked, his teddy clutched to his chest, his brother silent at his side, both boys cold and tired and wanting their dad, again.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” Kate said. “He won’t be home till after you’re asleep.”

  Ben turned angrily, quickly, and walked away. But Jake stayed. “Why?” he asked. “Why can’t he be home?”

  “Oh, he wants to, sweetie. But he has other things he needs to do, sometimes.”

  The boy wiped a tear from his cheek. Kate gathered him in her arms. “I’m sorry, Jake. But I promise that Daddy will give you a kiss when he gets home. Okay?”

  He nodded, fighting back more tears, then sulked off and joined his brother, who was already busying himself with Lego.

  Kate sat down at the computer. She moved aside files—LUXEMBOURG RENTAL FURNITURE and LUXEMBOURG SCHOOLS and LUXEMBOURG UTILITIES. She waited for the machine to locate the wireless signal. She stared at the screen, second-guessing what she was about to do. What she was hoping to find, and whether or not she wanted to.

  It didn’t occur to her that she was doing exactly what she was expected to.

  But before she could do anything, the phone rang again.

  “THANKS SO MUCH,” Julia said. “I feel completely lost with the Internet down.”

  “No problem.” Kate shut the door behind Julia. “I know exactly how you feel. Boys, say hello to Julia.”

  “Hi!”

  “Hello!”

  They ran back to the kitchen, the excitement of the doorbell finished, to their kitchen service: Ben was peeling carrots, Jake cutting them into chunks. Both were standing on stepstools at the
counter, concentrating hard, being careful with their sharp tools.

  “You’ve got sous-chefs,” Julia said.

  “Yes.” The boys were prepping for a poule au pot, the cookbook open on the counter, under a shelf containing a half-dozen other cookbooks, all mail-ordered from Amazon’s warehouses in England.

  Julia wandered into the living room. “Wow!” She’d noticed the view. “This place is great.”

  “Thanks.”

  They were now in the living room, through two doors and around one corner from the children. Well out of earshot. If they were ever going to mention Saturday night, it was going to be now. But they weren’t.

  “So the computer is in there,” Kate said, gesturing at the guest room.

  “Thanks again. I really appreciate it. I’ll probably be ten minutes?”

  “Whatever you need.” Kate left Julia alone.

  THE CHILDREN WERE asleep, and Dexter was at tennis with Bill, and Kate was alone, in the gray glow of the screen, her hands resting softly on the smooth keys, pointer fingers caressing the ridges on J and F. She felt a warmness, a tingling. She was looking for an activity, to relieve her boredom. And a picture, to enrich her fantasy.

  She typed: B I L L Space M A C L E A N

  The first page of the search revealed one cohesive personality with that name, but it wasn’t the one she was looking for. She scrolled through page after page of results—seven, eight, nine pages, scores of links—but no one turned out to be a currency trader, recently moved from Chicago to Luxembourg, age around forty.

  No Facebook. Nor LinkedIn. No university alumni updates, or high-school rosters, or society-page photos, or periodical references.

  W I L L I A M Space M A C L E A N

  A slightly different assortment of links, but mostly the same. On some second-tier professional-networking site, there was a page for a William Maclean of Chicago, profession listed as finance, nothing else. No picture, no links, no bio, nothing hard.

  She tried other spellings—Mclean, McLean, Maclane, Maclaine—but the results were almost exactly the same. No one she found was him.

  “WHAT ABOUT SANTIBANEZ?” Evan had asked.

  “I heard that was Leo,” Kate had answered.

  “Yeah, everybody heard that. You know anything more specific?”

  Now that this conversation was finally taking place, Kate was relieved. It had been a long time coming. She was surprised it was so roundabout, so full of interrogations and executions and assassinations that obviously had nothing to do with her.

  “Nope.”

  Evan glanced down at his pad. “He was killed in Veracruz. Two to the chest, one to the head. No abduction, no butchery, no spectacle.” Just like she’d been trained.

  This was the moment in the conversation—the debriefing, the interrogation—when she finally understood the point of this endless litany of violence: they were reminding Kate that even though she’d been out of the field for five years, she’d still not cleansed herself of the stench of dirty ops. She never would.

  “So it didn’t look like it was done by anyone in the narcotics business. What it looked like was something done by someone in our business.”

  And they would always know it.

  “Santibanez, he once ran with Lorenzo Romero, didn’t he?”

  Romero had been a CIA informant who’d fed his handler misleading intelligence, in exchange for huge sums of cash from the narcotraficantes. Unfortunately, the misinformation got his handler shot in the head and dumped in Tampico harbor. The whole Mexico division agreed to dole out retribution, and Kate, the sole female in the group, would have the easiest time getting the notorious womanizer into an unguarded, private predicament.

  “Like I said, I don’t know anything specific about Santibanez.”

  “Okay.” Evan nodded, eyes down on his pad. “How about Eduardo Torres?”

  Kate took a breath, neither too deep nor too shallow. At last, here it was.

  DEXTER WAS IN London when the move-out-move-in happened: the rental company showed up at eight in the morning, with a little crane, and retrieved all their furnishings—the couches and beds, linens and dishware, toilet brushes and vacuum cleaner. Chairs, bureaus, a desk, a dining table. All out the window, by ten in the morning. Papers signed, truck closed and driven away, gone.

  It was another dark and rainy autumn day. The window had been open all morning. The apartment was cold and empty. Kate was alone, again.

  Alone and waiting for the shipping container to arrive after three weeks pending customs clearance. The same orange container that had departed her curbside in D.C. two months ago, where she’d stood alone in that other empty house, papers signed attesting that everything was packed and loaded and attached to a black cab gaudily decorated with neon outlines of impossibly busty women, bound for the port of Baltimore to be loaded onto the freighter Osaka to cross the Atlantic in eleven days to Antwerp, then to be attached to a cab owned by a Dutch freight company, an undecorated white cab that was pulling around the corner right now, here, in front of this empty apartment, and she was alone again while her husband was working at the same job on a different continent, and her children were in school learning the same things, and the stuff in the container was the same, and the big differences being where she was, and who she was. In the middle of Europe, the new Kate.

  “DEXTER SEEMS LIKE a great husband. Is he?”

  Conversations with Julia often become much more personal than Kate wanted. Julia wore her need for intimacy on her sleeve, practically begging Kate to open up to her. Despite Julia’s bluff of outgoing confidence, she was tremendously insecure. She’d been unlucky in love, unconfident in relationships, and uncomfortable in intimacy. She’d been lonely her whole life, much like Kate, until she’d chanced into Bill. But she was still operating on lonely-person principles, still worried that her happiness could be wrenched away at any moment, for reasons out of her control.

  Kate didn’t know how to answer Julia’s question—even a private answer, to herself. Her relationship with Dexter had improved right after they’d moved—Dexter had been unusually attentive, and they’d been closer, cozier. The change had done them good; the move was good for their marriage. Though not yet good for Kate, as an individual.

  But then Dexter had become increasingly absent, traveling who knows where. She barely had the energy to listen to his itineraries. Also more and more evasive, distant, and distracted when he was home.

  Kate couldn’t decide whether she needed to break the promise she’d made herself to not be suspicious of her husband. And if she gave in to the urge, and let herself be suspicious, of what? Cheating? Having some type of psychological crisis? Was his job falling apart, and he wasn’t telling her? Was he angry at her about something?

  She couldn’t guess the realm where the problem dwelt. Or even if there was one. And although she felt the vague need to talk about it, she felt a stronger compulsion to keep her concerns secret. She’d always been comfortable with the unsaid; secrets are what she did.

  Kate looked Julia in the eye, through this door to another level of their relationship, and decided not to walk through it. As she’d been doing her entire life.

  “Yes,” Kate said, “he’s a great husband.”

  KATE SETTLED INTO a routine.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, after drop-off, she did her French homework, then went to class. Kate’s instructor, a disturbingly young and good-natured French-Somali woman, was impressed with Kate’s rapid progress and natural-sounding accent. French wasn’t difficult for Kate, after all those years speaking Spanish, mastering the nuances among dialects, Cuban and Nicaraguan, northern Mexican and eastern Mexican.

  Two or three days a week, she went to the gym. She’d accepted the recommendation of Amber—always exercising, yet never fit—and joined a bizarre institution that offered ham sandwiches and cappuccinos but neither towels nor early-morning fitness classes; the doors didn’t even open until nine.

  Kate drove a
round, looking for things. She drove thirty minutes to a big toy store in a shopping plaza in Foetz, pronounced futz. She was searching for an item that was proving to be elusive, a Robin action figure. Not a big surprise, because who wants Robin instead of the readily available Batman? Ben, that’s who.

  She went to Metz, forty-five minutes away, looking for an immersion blender.

  She drove the main byways of Luxembourg—route d’Arlon, route de Thionville, route de Longwy—poking in and out of shopping plazas and malls, eating steam-table buffet lunches at Indian restaurants, bland tikka masala, greasy naan.

  She sat at the computer, researching weekend destinations, hotels and attractions, flights and highway routes, restaurants and zoos.

  She got the car washed, at a variety of locations. In one, she got stuck for a half-hour. A solicitous jumpsuited employee kept checking on her every few minutes. At one point, he mentioned that she was welcome to call the police.

  She had her hair cut. There was a lot of bad hair in Luxembourg, and she couldn’t quite avoid becoming a victim, just on the cusp of being able to communicate that she did not want the features—mullets and bangs and spikes—that the hairdressers specialized in.

  She bought window shades and area rugs, place mats and shower caddies.

  She purchased and installed an extra towel bar in the master bathroom. Which entailed buying an electric drill. Then returning to the hardware superstore to buy the bits that had not been included with the drill. Then returning again for the diamond-tipped masonry bits that she’d need to push holes through whatever was behind the plaster coating of her walls. Each round-trip to the store took an hour.

  She met other women for coffee, or lunch. Mostly it was Julia, but sometimes Amber, or Claire, or anyone; there was no one who she wasn’t willing to give a try. Dutch and Swedes, Germans and Canadians. She was her own ambassador.

  Also her own babysitter. She lay on the floor with the boys, building things out of Lego or wooden blocks, pushing around the cardboard cutouts of thirty-six-piece jigsaw puzzles. She read aloud book after book after book.