The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  “SO HOW DO you think we handle the FBI?” he asked. Kate didn’t realize at the time what a thoroughly disingenuous question this was.

  She stared into space, puzzling out this challenge. “In the morning, I’ll call Julia,” she said, glancing at her watch. The children would be waking up any minute. “I’ll arrange a meeting.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure they’ll ask me to help them. Probably by wearing a wire. I’ll feign outrage, but they’ll press their case, promise how miserable they’ll make our lives if I don’t cooperate.” Now that Kate was saying it aloud, this plan was beginning to sound like the exact right course of action. “So I’ll agree to do it.”

  Dexter raised his eyebrows, leaned forward. “Then?”

  “Then you and I will go someplace semi-public, as if we’re trying to ensure that there’s no surveillance. A neutral, unanticipated locale. A restaurant, I think …” Kate trailed off, trying to picture the right place. Trying to solve every last problem, all at once.

  “Yes? Then?”

  “Then we’ll put on a show. For their benefit.”

  30

  Their show was, finally, over. The car hurtled through the night, the straight two-lane road unlit and lonely, the wheels thrumming on the pavement, humming along through the countryside toward the glow in the distant sky above the city, above their home and their children, the resumption of a normal life, or the creation of a new one.

  Dexter was driving faster than usual. Maybe he’d drunk too much at the restaurant, succumbing to the pressure of the performance for the benefit of the microphone and the FBI agents on the other end of the transmission. The device was still transmitting.

  They allowed the silence in the car to wash over them, a warm bath of nontalking, nonperforming. For the first time in memory, the silence between them wasn’t filled with layers upon layers of lies. But Kate was hyper-aware of the one big untruth that still hung between them.

  She watched the road, the hypnotizing yellow line in the middle of the band of black. She was wavering, yet again. Then she suddenly grew more frustrated with herself than she could bear.

  Enough.

  “Dexter,” she said, forcing herself into it before she had time to reconsider, “could you pull into the rest area up ahead?”

  He took his foot off the gas pedal, shot a glance at his wife.

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  THE REST AREA was a few miles south of the city, a massive complex crowded with parked eighteen-wheelers, with drunk teenagers spilling out of beat-up Skodas to buy beer and cigarettes and big bags of chips, with pierced young Dutch on long-haul road trips back from the Alps, with silent exhausted Portuguese laborers eating shrink-wrapped sandwiches on their way home from mopping the ketchup-sticky floors of fast-food restaurants.

  Dexter kept the car idling, the heated seats on, headlights off. He turned to Kate.

  She considered the transmitter. She thought about asking Dexter to step out, into the grim seclusion of the parking lot. But of course the FBI and Interpol already knew everything she was about to tell him, so why bother?

  “Dexter,” she said, “I never wrote position papers.”

  It was hard to read his face in the dim blue glow from the dashboard lights. She fought the urge to look away, to hide her own eyes. Struggled against the long-ingrained habit of disguising her own lies, now that she was finally telling the truth.

  “And I never worked for the State Department.”

  A tractor-trailer drove by in low gear, the rumble and grumble of the big engine, the rattling and clanging of the hardware. Kate waited for the noise to pass.

  “What I did for a living …”

  Then she changed her mind. Although Kate knew what she was planning to say, she didn’t know how Dexter would respond.

  Kate glanced at the brightly lit building at the center of the rest area, the convenience store and the café area, the gleaming floors and neatly organized tables.

  She unclasped the watch from her wrist, slipped it into the pleated leather seat pocket. “Let’s go get a coffee.”

  DEXTER DROPPED THE coin into the machine and pressed the button and waited for the sputter and hiss and burble of the espresso, spitting and spurting out of the discolored plastic nozzle into the flimsy disposable cup.

  Kate took a sip of her cappuccino. It wasn’t bad, this rest-area-machine coffee; it was hot and strong and decent. There was a lot of good coffee, everywhere in Europe.

  They took seats at a pebbled-glass-topped table, lightweight steel chairs, a giant window facing the highway. Another couple was sitting on the other side of the room, the woman teary-eyed, in their own mode of crisis: a breakup, an unwanted pregnancy, an affair. Those people had their own troubles, wouldn’t attempt to eavesdrop on anyone else’s.

  There was no point in preamble. Kate reached across the table, took Dexter’s hands in hers. “I worked for the CIA,” she said. “I was what you’d call a spy.”

  Dexter’s eyes widened.

  “My job was to run assets in Latin America. I worked a little bit in El Salvador, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Panama, and Guatemala. But mostly it was Mexico.”

  He looked as if he was about to say something, but he didn’t.

  “I started with the Agency straight out of college. It’s all I ever did. It was a career I chose, in large part, because I thought I was incapable of loving anyone. My experiences with my parents, my sister … I was a numb person. I discounted myself from the possibility of genuine intimacy. I believed I’d never have my own family.”

  Kate squeezed Dexter’s hands, emphasizing this, the most operative component of the multilayered apology.

  “I thought I’d always be alone, Dexter. I thought I’d never need to lie to anyone I loved, because there’d never be anyone I loved. I was young, and I was damaged, and I couldn’t imagine being not young, and not damaged. You remember how it was to be young?”

  He nodded, still mute.

  “It was impossible to understand how brief it is. It seemed like youth would last so long; it would last forever. But it’s just a blink.”

  At the table on the other side of the cafeteria, the woman let out a short loud sob.

  “So when you and I met, I of course didn’t tell you the truth about what I did. I expected I’d dump you in six months. Or you’d get frustrated with how closed I was, and you’d get rid of me. I thought we’d never connect, just as I’d never connected with anyone.”

  Dexter was watching her intently.

  “But I was wrong. It turned out I fell in love with you.”

  Kate’s attention was caught by a man entering the store, glancing her way. She hoped that a day would come when she wouldn’t be suspicious of everyone who walked by.

  “I wanted to tell you, Dexter. Please believe that. I considered it thousands of times. Almost every day, for the entire time we’ve known each other. But when could I have told you? When should I have passed that point?”

  This had been exactly the same rationale he’d used last night, out on their balcony, the legitimate coming-clean, after which they’d planned the fake coming-clean, performed tonight for the benefit of the feds. Now, here in this rest area, they’d returned to the privacy of their marriage.

  “Then we got married, and I still hadn’t told you. How awful. Really, I completely admit it: this was awful of me.”

  Dexter gave her a tiny smile, a small concession.

  “Then after Jake …” Kate paused, wondering how many of the details to tell him, how full her disclosure needed to be to count, to satisfy herself. “I transferred out of operations, became an analyst, at a desk in Washington. You don’t know what this means. But it’s … it’s like quitting being the starting shortstop to become the first-base coach.”

  Dexter had once been an avid baseball fan. He gave Kate another pained-looking smile, but seemed incapable of speaking.

  “I essentially threw awa
y my career. But I stayed with the CIA. We needed the paycheck, and the health insurance, which soon you weren’t providing for us.”

  Dexter let a grimace escape; she shouldn’t have gone there. Health care in Luxembourg was, thankfully, universal and free.

  “Anyway,” she said, “the point is, I never did get around to telling you.” Kate couldn’t tell if he was angry, or sad, or outraged, or shell-shocked. Much later, she would realize that stoicism was all he could muster. He had never been trained for this type of confrontation. He was not naturally or professionally devious. Just by happenstance.

  “And when we moved here, of course, I did quit. But at that point, why should I tell you the truth? How could I? I’d been lying to you for a decade. And now the lie was finally over. I had every reason to think it was becoming irrelevant, more every day. So why should I admit it? What good would that do? As I remember you once said, about the secrecy of your supposed—nonexistent—client, it would’ve been a big downside with no upside.”

  Dexter stared across the room, at nothing.

  “Except I was wrong, Dexter, I know. I should’ve found a way, at some point, to tell you. But I didn’t.” She tried to make her eyes beg for forgiveness. “And I’m so, so sorry.”

  Dexter now gave Kate a cheeky smile, a smile that looked full of indulgence and superciliousness and condescension. A smile that someone uses when receiving an important and heartfelt apology. A smile of leniency paired with superiority. A smile that says, I am willing to accept your apology, but now you owe me.

  Or at least that’s what it looked like to Kate, at the time.

  She wouldn’t figure this out for another year and a half, but Dexter’s was a smile of deep relief. A smile of someone who could finally stop pretending he didn’t know something that he’d known for a long time.

  IT STARTED TO rain, as usual. Slowly at first, misting over the picture window that faced the highway. Then the loud patter of heavy drops on the glass atrium overhead.

  A car made a turn that threw headlights in Dexter’s eyes. “What did you do?”

  “Mostly I met with people,” Kate said. “I encouraged them to do things that we—the United States, or at least the CIA—wanted them to do. I persuaded them.”

  “How?”

  “I gave them money, and information. I helped them organize. Sometimes I threatened them with bad outcomes if they were uncooperative.”

  “Such as?”

  “Mostly the absence of things they wanted. Money, or weapons, or the support of the U.S. government. Instead their rivals would get that support. Or money, or weapons.”

  “But sometimes it was something else?”

  “Sometimes I told people that they’d be killed.”

  “By you?”

  “I usually left that part vague.”

  “And were they? Killed?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “By you?”

  “Not really.”

  “What does that mean, not really?”

  Kate wanted to not answer this question. So she didn’t.

  Dexter looked away, about to ask a question he didn’t want to. “Was it part of your job to have sex with people? ”

  “No.”

  “But did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Sleep with other people?”

  “No,” she said. “Did you?”

  “No.”

  Kate took a final sip of her cappuccino, now room temperature, stasis with the ambient atmosphere. This was an unexpected turn into the irrelevant realm of sexual fidelity, the one deception in which neither had engaged.

  “Did you ever kill anyone?” he asked point-blank.

  She knew this was coming—she’d dreaded this—but still she hadn’t settled on her answer. On how complete her answer would be. “Yes.”

  “How many?”

  She didn’t want to give a number. This was one of the main reasons she’d never told Dexter the truth. It wasn’t merely the Agency’s code of secrecy that she didn’t want to break, and it wasn’t her reluctance to admit that she’d been lying all those years. The primary reason she never wanted to have this conversation was she didn’t want to answer this question, asked by this man, who would never again look at her the same way.

  “A few.”

  His face asked for a greater degree of specificity, or honesty. But Kate shook her head. She would not give him the number.

  “Recently?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Meaning?” There was impatience in his voice, exhaustion with her evasions.

  “The last time was a few months after Jake was born. It was someone I’d known in Mexico.” If she was going to have to tell him this, she was going to tell him the whole story. Nearly.

  “He was a politician who’d lost a presidential election. He was planning another try, and wanted our support. My support. I’d written him off, and in fact that final trip I took to Mexico was to meet with other politicians, other guys who were considering a run. He found out about that. And when I came home, he kind of forced me to take a meeting with him.”

  “Forced you? How?”

  “He sort of abducted me. Off the street. It wasn’t violent, but there was definitely a threat to the situation. The meeting turned into a long harangue about why we—why I—should support him. Then he showed me a photo, taken through our window, of me with Jake in our living room.”

  Dexter cocked his head, asking to confirm if he understood.

  “He was threatening me. If I didn’t support him, harm would come to my family. I couldn’t decide how credible this threat was. I wouldn’t have taken it seriously at all, except for the fact that this man was a deeply irrational player. A delusional guy. And I had a baby. My first. Our first.”

  “So.”

  “So I couldn’t see clearly any way to ensure that he left us alone. A guy like that, his reach is far longer than deportation, or imprisonment, or … or anything. If he wanted harm to come to us, harm would come to us.”

  “Unless you killed him.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? Where?”

  She didn’t want to give the murder-pornography frame by frame. Didn’t want to recite her route across Manhattan, the length of the knife blade and the number of times she pulled the trigger, the color of the blood-splattered wallpaper in the hotel room, the man falling to the floor, the baby crying in the next room, the woman emerging and dropping the bottle, its nipple popping off and the milk spilling onto the carpet, the woman pleading “Por favor,” her hands up, shaking her head, asking—begging—for her life to be spared, her big black eyes wide, deep sinkholes of dark terror, while Kate trained the Glock on her, a seemingly eternal internal debate, while the baby sounded like he was the same age as Jake, late infancy, and this poor woman the same age as Kate, a different version of herself, an unlucky woman who didn’t deserve to die.

  “Dexter, I don’t want to get into all the details.”

  She didn’t want to tell him about the blood that was spreading through the carpet fibers from the tremendous hole in the back of Torres’s head. Damn’d spot.

  “Maybe someday,” Kate said. “But not now. Okay?”

  Dexter nodded.

  “And what I realized,” Kate continued, “was that it had become too easy to get to me, to rattle me. To make me behave in ways I shouldn’t. I knew I had to leave the field; I had to stop interacting with assets.”

  That young woman had seen Kate’s face. She’d seen that Kate had killed Torres and the bodyguard. That woman, that witness to cold-blooded murder, could send Kate to jail. Could wrest Kate from her baby, her husband. From her life.

  “So after I killed this man, I went back to my office, and I asked for a reassignment.”

  Kate was aiming the gun at the woman’s chest, holding her right wrist steady in her left palm, beginning to panic, wondering if she had the strength to do this. Wondering if she had the strength to not do this.


  And in the next room, the baby cried out again, louder.

  IT HADN’T TAKEN very long to come clean, after so many years of so many lies. It was surprising how undifferent she felt, now that everything—nearly everything—was out in the open.

  They both had a legitimate right to be furious with the other. But their separate self-righteous indignations seemed to be canceling each other out, and neither was angry. Worry was etched in Dexter’s face. Kate thought this worry was for their future. Maybe he was wondering if they could make it, such liars, together. A marriage based on so many things that were not true. A life lived so falsely, for so long.

  Kate didn’t know that Dexter hadn’t admitted all his lies. Just as she hadn’t revealed every one of her secrets.

  He opened his mouth, let it hang silently, struggling with something, then gave up. “I’m sorry too, Kat. I’m so sorry.”

  Sitting there in that rest area, she later realized, Dexter had been struggling with whether to admit the deepest layer of his deception. But he had decided against it.

  And so had she.

  31

  Kate felt her way through the hall, fingertips trailing the pebbled wallpaper, to the glowing door of the boys’ room. When she’d left before dinner, distracted, she’d failed to close their blinds. The streetlight streamed into their bedroom, bathing everything in a silver tint, a powder-coated world of little clothes and little toys and innocent little boys, with unlined foreheads and impossibly slender shoulders.

  She walked to their beds, junior-size mattresses barely bigger than crib mattresses, but nevertheless referred to as big-boy beds. She kissed each head, fresh-smelling silky hair. Both children were sprawled in different ludicrous positions, limbs akimbo, as if they’d been dropped onto these small beds from a great height. Plop.

  Kate looked out the window before closing the blinds. The babysitter was climbing into the passenger seat, Dexter behind the wheel, about to drive her across the bridge to the Gare, to her tight little street crammed with mediocre Asian restaurants. Luxembourg is a place where a great steak au poivre is half the price of awful Chinese food.