by Chris Pavone
“Mmm,” Kate said, distractedly. Her original suspicion was that the Macleans had fled the States to escape something. But now she was becoming convinced of the opposite: they’d come to Luxembourg to accomplish something specific. Was it completely unreasonable to think it was an assassination?
KATE TURNED OUT the light and turned to Dexter, the taste of red wine mingled with toothpaste, moving through the paces, grabbing this and licking that, paint-by-numbers sex, not particularly satisfying nor in any fashion problematic, just another unremarkable in a series of uncountables.
And after, a drink of water, pajamas pulled on, breath not all that difficult to catch.
“Listen, tomorrow night I’m playing tennis with Bill,” Dexter said.
She didn’t turn to Dexter, in the dark. “You have a good time with him, don’t you?”
“Yeah. He’s a good guy.”
Kate stared at the ceiling. She wanted, needed, to talk about this with someone, with this exact someone. As much as Kate had been resenting Dexter, and this new life of hers, he was still her best friend. But she was worried—no, it was beyond the uncertainty of worry; it was awareness—that this would cross some line in their marriage, a line that no one acknowledged until you were on its precipice. You know the lines are there, you feel them: the things you don’t discuss. The sexual fantasies. The flirtations with other people. The deep-seated distrusts, misgivings, resentments. You go about your business, as far away from these lines as possible, pretending they’re not there. So when you eventually find yourself at one of these lines, your toe inching over, it’s not only shocking and horrifying, it’s banal. Because you’ve always been aware that the lines were there, where you were trying with all your might not to see them, knowing that sooner or later you would.
“Why?” Dexter asked. “You sound like you have something on your mind.”
If Kate said, “Dexter, I’m afraid that Bill and Julia aren’t who they claim,” he would be angry. He’d be defensive. He’d have all sorts of possible, plausible explanations.
“You have something against Bill?”
Eventually Dexter would confront Bill, nonconfrontationally. And he’d be fed a line, which Dexter would swallow. They were in the witness-protection program, is what Kate suspected they’d claim. They couldn’t discuss the details, the veracity of the story couldn’t be confirmed, couldn’t be proven or disproven. That’s what her story would be, if she were in Bill’s shoes.
Kate wasn’t sure which she most wanted to avoid: fighting with Dexter about Bill’s possible secrets, or revealing to Dexter—finally—her own.
So she lay there, feet splayed, looking up at the dark ceiling, trying to figure out a way to say something to her husband.
In hindsight, this was the moment—not a unique moment, but a specific one that she remembered, later—that could’ve changed so much. All the craziness hadn’t started; she hadn’t yet begun stockpiling new secrets, each addition compounding the ones that preceded, a vicious cycle, out of control.
Lying in bed, wanting to start a conversation but unable to bring herself to begin, and eventually saying nothing other than “No, of course not. Bill is great.”
The most important non-action of her life.
TODAY, 11:40 A.M.
At one end of the hall is the linen closet, neatly organized shelves and cubbies filied with floral-print bedclothes and plush white towels. At the other end is the closet where they keep the luggage. Kate turns the battered brass knob that’s set into the ornately molded plate that’s screwed to the gleaming creamy paint of the paneled closet door.
The large pieces are stacked one upon the other on the floor, a trunk and two full-sized suitcases. These big things are what they use to pack for the summer on the Côte d’Azur, or a few weeks in Umbria. But what she pulls down are two midsize wheelies and a tote.
Kate wheels one of the bags to the boys’ room. She packs three days’ pants and shirts, socks and underwear. In the adjoining bathroom, she pulls a toilet kit from the shelf above the mirror, into which she dumps their toothbrushes and toothpaste. She grabs the first-aid kit from the basket below the sink. Little boys do a lot of bleeding, wherever they go; European playgrounds are a lot less padded than American ones. Kate long ago tired of searching for plasters and antibiotic cream in Belgium and Germany, in Italy and Spain. So now they travel with their own supply.
She walks to her bedroom, through it, into the dressing room. She unfolds a luggage stand and lays the bag on it, adds her own things automatically, thinking about many subjects, none of them clothing. By her most recent reckoning, she has packed their bags forty-three separate times in the two years they’ve lived in Europe. Back in her old life, before the kids were born? Hundreds of times.
Kate finishes the autopilot packing. Before they depart, she will remember something: a phone charger, the boys’ current books, passports. She always does, when she’s packing while distracted. So she doesn’t zip the bag closed, and leaves it on the stand, ready for whatever she will remember later.
She has no idea how long she’s packing for. She could be packing pointlessly, for nothing. Or for one night or three, or for a few weeks or a month. Or forever.
But this is what they’d discussed, she and Dexter. If someone showed up, if they thought they were compromised, they’d pack for three days. Easily transportable luggage, not notable to anyone as being a lot of stuff, just a jaunt somewhere. If it turned out they were away much longer, they could always buy whatever they needed. They had plenty of money. And their money could be used to buy them flexibility somewhere else, later. Which is what they might not have here in Paris, now.
Kate retrieves the second wheelie bag, brings it to the other side of the dressing room, props it on the other luggage stand. Dexter’s.
Matching luggage. She never would’ve guessed that one day she’d become a woman with a ten-piece set of matching luggage. This is yet another persona that she has fallen into, without quite intending to.
Kate is again standing in her long, elegant hallway, its wallpapered surfaces lined with photos of her children, skiing in the French Alps and frolicking in the Mediterranean surf, on canals in Amsterdam and Bruges, at the Vatican and the Eiffel Tower, the zoo in Barcelona and a theme park in Denmark and a playground in Kensington Gardens. The hallway doors are all flung open, to the public rooms and private rooms, light streaming from a variety of sources, at different angles.
Kate sighs. She doesn’t want to leave Paris. She wants to stay here, to live here. She wants her children to answer “Paris” to the question “Where are you from?”
All she needs is a little something different, here, to round out her life. She needs to scratch an itch. Moving to Bali or Tasmania or Mykonos isn’t going to do it. The problem is—the problem will always be—within herself, rooted in her distant past, back when she made the fateful decisions to become the person she became, back …
… back in college …
Something occurs to her, and she sets off down the hall, quickly.
11
Kate stared at her computer in front of the window, the view now dark and cloaked in fog punctuated by hazy points of light. Dark somber Impressionism, with electricity.
Jake and Ben were on the floor, playing diligently, sitting crisscross applesauce. Kate took her hands off the keyboard, and sighed.
“Mommy, what’s wrong?”
She looked down at Jake, big concerned eyes under an innocent, unlined forehead. “I haven’t found what I’m looking for.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “Do you want to play with us?”
Kate had spent the equivalent of a full workweek searching for criminals who could’ve been Bill or Julia. She’d found nothing.
“Yes.” She folded the laptop. Gave up being a spy, and went back to being a mom. “Yes I do.”
THE DRYER’S BUZZER went off just as Kate cut a tomato in half. She distractedly set the tomato down on a piece of paper towel. After
ten minutes of laundry folding, the tomato’s juices had bled onto the towel, radiating along the fault lines of its fibers, dark red tendrils reaching out, grabbing Kate’s consciousness and dragging her back to a hotel room in New York City, a man lying on the floor, blood oozing from a crater in the back of his head, seeping into the pale carpeting in the same pattern as this tomato’s juices, on this paper towel.
And then the unexpected woman had been standing there, mouth open, frozen.
Years before that, it had been Hayden who’d explained about blood. “Shakespeare was no dope,” he’d said to Kate, crossing the Ponte Umberto I. The day’s training was completed, and her trainer was taking her to dinner, at a trattoria behind the Castel Sant’Angelo. “The thing that tortured Lady Macbeth was Duncan’s blood. The same thing will torture you too, if you allow it. Out, damn’d spot!”
Kate looked at Hayden. Over his shoulder was the majestic dome of St. Peter’s, bathed in the golden light of sunset. He too turned to admire the view.
“Once you see some things,” Hayden said, “you can never forget them. If you don’t want to have to see them for the rest of your life, it’s better not to look in the first place.”
They turned away from the Vatican, started walking again toward the old prison. “Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?” Hayden was CIA via Back Bay and then Groton and Harvard, just like his father and grandfather before him. Kate suspected they all quoted literature that was never less than a few hundred years old.
“Remember, Kate,” he’d said. “They all have a surprising amount of blood in them.”
Fifteen years later, staring at her soiled paper towel, Kate realized why she’d been planning a family trip to Germany.
THE CHILDREN WERE upstairs, playing dress-up, loudly. Wearing gladiator helmets, which the boys called gladier helmicks. Kate didn’t have the heart to correct them. If she allowed these childish mispronunciations, maybe they’d stay younger, longer. Then so would she.
Kate shut the guest-room door. Punched in the digits.
“What do you have for me today?” she asked.
“Hmm, let’s see … Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest, and lost. He didn’t even make the finals.”
“Nice. That’s a seven. Maybe eight.”
“Well thank you very much.”
“Listen, I’m planning a family trip to Bavaria.” Kate knew this conversation was being recorded. Maybe monitored in real-time, someone in headphones listening for a minute and then calling in his boss, and his boss calling a colleague, all of them sitting around with headphones plugged into a panel of jacks, wondering what this exchange was about. It was an unusual link again, from this open private line in Luxembourg to the office in Munich. “Any advice for me?”
“Bavaria! Wonderful. I’ve a plethora of suggestions.” Hayden rattled off the names of hotels and restaurants, directions, sights.
When he was finished, Kate said, “I also thought we might get together, you and I.”
If Hayden was suspicious about this, he didn’t let on. But of course he wouldn’t.
“BONJOUR?” THE UNCERTAIN voice crackled over the intercom.
“Hi!” Kate semi-screamed into the microphone. “It’s Kate!”
Pause. “Kate?”
“Yes!”
“Oh … Hi. Come on up.”
The doorbell buzzed, a weak little hum, like a malfunctioning toaster. Upstairs, in the dark stunted hallway, Julia was leaning on her door-jamb in a terry-cloth robe, trying to smile but not much succeeding. It was nine A.M.
“Sorry for not calling. I’m having a bit of a morning.”
“No worries,” Julia said, sounding odd. Julia didn’t say things like “No worries.”
“I rushed out this morning,” Kate said, “and forgot not only my phone, but also my house keys. All I have is the car key. Could I use your phone? I need to call Dexter.”
“Of course.”
Julia walked into the guest bedroom, retrieved a landline from its dock on the desk, and thrust the phone at Kate.
“Thanks. Sorry again to bother you. And Bill. Is he here?”
“No. He left a few minutes ago.”
Kate knew this. “Thanks again.”
Kate dialed Dexter’s office. When she’d hatched this plan, she’d considered making this call a fake one—dialing a nonexistent number, or her own mobile, then having a pretend conversation. But if she was right about Julia and Bill, they’d catch her; they’d find a way. Maybe Bill would quiz Dexter; maybe Julia would check the phone records.
So it had to be the real thing. And for extra verisimilitude—with Julia, with Dexter, with herself—Kate had also contrived to rush out of her apartment, and had purposefully left her keys and phone sitting impotently on the kitchen counter.
“Bonjour. Dexter Moore.”
“Hi,” Kate said. “It’s me. I forgot my house keys. Could you meet me at home?”
“Jesus, Kat.”
She knew he would be pissed; she was counting on it. He’d left for work at seven in the morning, a busy day, a Big Day. That’s why she was doing this today: so he would be angry, and she could therefore say, “Don’t give me grief, Dexter,” and roll her eyes at Julia and hold up an indulgence-begging finger, and walk into the guest bedroom for privacy, to have a phone-fight with her husband, alone.
Kate looked around the room quickly but carefully, taking in everything. The bed was made neatly, but not perfectly; of the four pillows, one bore the unmistakable wrinkles and deep folds and misshapenness of something that had been slept on, then not fluffed out.
“I forgot my keys, by mistake,” Kate said. “I didn’t spit in your eye, on purpose.”
A book sat on the bedside table near the used pillow, a paperback with a simple cover depicting farmland, a female author, the words a novel under a long, vague title; chick lit. A water glass. A tissue box. Lip balm.
It was Julia who was sleeping here, in this bed that was not in the master bedroom.
“I’m about to walk out,” Dexter said, “to a meeting.”
The desk was small, tidy. The laptop was closed; there were no readable papers lying around, other than a couple envelopes, addressed to a street in Limpertsberg and to an entity called WJM, S.A. This was a société anonyme, similar to the société à responsibilité limitée, which was continental for Ltd. This, she assumed, was William J. Maclean, Inc.
There was a file drawer, but no way that Kate could chance opening it; that would be impossible to explain, if she got caught.
The peripheral device was a big affair, a scanner and photocopier and printer all-in-one. There was a small pile of business cards on the desk. Kate pulled a handkerchief out of her jeans and used it to shuffle through the cards, her fingers not touching the stack of paper. One of them was for a tennis club; Julia didn’t play tennis. Kate plucked this one out with the hankie, slid the card into her pocket.
“I understand, Dex, and I’m sorry.”
She walked to the bedside table, safely out of Julia’s sight. She used the handkerchief to pick up the lip balm and drop it in with the pilfered business card.
Kate wondered if this was an unhappy marriage, or if Julia was a standard-issue insomniac, or if she had a cold and didn’t want to disturb her husband last night.
Or if this was something far less ordinary.
“AND DEXTER WILL be late,” Kate said. “He’s always late returning from meetings; somehow, everything takes longer than he expects it to. So we don’t need to be back till one.”
“Okay.” Julia called out from the bathroom, where she was fixing her makeup. Kate knew Julia well enough to know that she never left the house without looking as perfect as she could.
Kate wandered over to the windows that faced the palace. The flagpole was flagless; no royalty in residence. The yard was empty of vehicles. A single guard stood at the back gate, weapon resting on his shoulder, bored. This window was
certainly a great vantage.
But the crucial thing, Kate knew, was being able to get out. Just like a bank robbery, or an extramarital affair: getting in is the easy part.
“So shall we?” They were headed to a mall, to while away the morning.
“We shall.” Kate pushed a small button on her watch, and walked away from the window on the rue de l’Eau, out the apartment door, into the tiny elevator, and six levels down, into the garage, where they climbed into Julia’s Mercedes, and exited onto a different street, the rue du St-Esprit, a narrow cobblestone lane that was a few confusing turns away from the palais, and after fifty yards St-Esprit made a dramatic ninety-degree turn on a steep descent before dead-ending into the equally narrow cobblestoned lane called rue Large, which climbed steeply through a medieval arch before ending at rue Sigefroi, which a couple seconds later merged into the Montée du Clausen, aka local route 1, a road that would soon present the choice of speeding away at a hundred kilometers per hour along every point of the compass, to Germany or France, to the airport or the countryside, to anywhere.
Kate checked her watch: under two minutes from the window to unimpeded freedom.
They were foreign nationals, bearing false names, living across the street from a target-rich environment, with a vantage that couldn’t be clearer, an escape that couldn’t be quicker.
This was just circumstantial evidence, Kate knew. And maybe she wasn’t even genuinely suspicious. Maybe she’d tricked herself into suspicion so she’d have an excuse to investigate them. To have something to do. Anything.
She was having a hard time distinguishing among the levels of implausibility of various scenarios that were floating around the murky swamp of her imagination. On the one hand, it seemed highly unlikely—it seemed nearly outrageous—that a hit-man team would come to Luxembourg to assassinate someone. She couldn’t deny that. But she also couldn’t dismiss this as a rational explanation for why a pair of people with secret identities would rent a flat that would allow such an ideal opportunity on assassinate-able characters.
