The Paris Diversion

by Chris Pavone

It’s not really the hashtags that eat at Kate. They’re just a symptom. The disease is superior parenting—humble-brags and name-drops and condescending advice that all elicit this stream of positive reinforcement from HM’s so-called friends, hollow affirmations and validations, omg so beautiful! and u r the best mum ever!! and couldn’t agree more!!!

  These posts accuse Kate that she herself is an inadequate #ExpatMom. That she doesn’t lay it all out there, her love for her children, her pride in her kids and husband, her rented villas and reupholstered chaises and adventure safaris.

  Kate isn’t immune—is anyone?—to wanting to be a perfect mom. And all these valedictory hashtags are reminders that she isn’t. But Kate reminds herself that this isn’t Hashtag Mom’s fault. Also that Kate’s own priorities are a lot more consequential than social-media likes.

  Her phone dings again: Anyone know why all the police????!!!!

  It’s not just hashtags that Hashtag Mom uses with reckless abandon.

  * * *

  “Merci,” she says to Julien as he delivers her café.

  “Je vous en prie.”

  The waiters here know everyone in the family, their coffee preferences, evening drinks. They are regulars, just like Sartre and Camus had been, de Beauvoir and Brecht, Picasso and Joyce and Baldwin and Wright, Julia Child. And now Ben and Jake and Dexter and Kate, the Moores. These waiters have watched the kids grow, become fluent in French, Jake now corrects Kate’s pronunciation—“No, Mommy, it’s rrhhhobbb-eh,” a guttural r sound from deep in his throat, a noise that Kate will never be able to get quite right.

  They’d come to Paris licking their wounds, somehow having survived the disaster of Luxembourg and emerging even stronger. Or maybe that’s just how they choose to spin it to each other, to themselves. Though not to anyone else, they won’t ever be able to explain any of it, to anyone. There were too many illegal aspects, clandestine operations, the CIA and FBI and Interpol, a whole mess.

  And maybe the tale they tell themselves is a lie; maybe they’re not stronger. Maybe they’re just pretending, because that’s what you do, that’s how marriage works, how life works: you pretend everything is fine. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a preponderance of evidence. But you convict only if the evidence is beyond all reasonable doubt. The burden of criminal court, not civil.

  It’s still possible—it will always be possible—that Dexter’s past will eventually sneak up and attack him. Or Kate’s.

  But that hasn’t happened, not yet. Their life is placid. So Kate comes to the café with her husband, and she watches Paris stroll by, les hommes d’affaires in their slim-silhouette suits and pointy shoes and seven-day stubble, the women in their perfectly tailored skirts and deftly knotted scarves. Kate herself is wearing a scarf, tied the way that Parisian women do, a thing she had to learn.

  Kate has grown out of her tourist love of the city, sees this place more plainly for what’s wrong with it. She still loves Paris, but now it’s a mature love, clear-eyed with no illusions, no misconceptions. No shortage of disappointments, resentments, grievances.

  Not unlike her marriage. Not unlike any marriage.

  Another flock of police cars comes flying up the boulevard, and everyone watches for a few seconds before returning to their everyday concerns, a little less comfortable.

  11

  VENICE. 9:23 A.M.

  The baby is gurgling, a sound that could be a prelude to crying, or could be harmless. At the moment, no action is required.

  She turns her attention back to the computer on the ornate rolltop desk, the barrage of financial-market information bombarding her. She’s trying to hear the various squawk boxes of the world at once, her ear attuned to a few specific developments. A handful of bank sites are also loaded onto her screen, plus a dozen brokerage accounts, representing trades she made over the past weeks, all using different aliases, executed at different times of different days for different amounts, eighty here, one-thirty there.

  There will be thorough investigations. She’s taking thorough precautions.

  There are dozens of windows open in front of her.

  Each account has its own regimen of security protocols—bot-combating interfaces, triple-encrypted user names, random-character passcodes generated by a battery-powered remote device. A rich tapestry of multilayered defenses against the ever more aggressive, sophisticated, relentless intrusions of hackers.

  She of all people is well aware that hacking pays lucratively, and anything that pays lucratively attracts high-caliber talent. Smuggling, drug-trafficking, arms-dealing, bond-trading, hedge-funding, all these legal and illegal methods of skimming, of chiseling a cut between production and consumption. All immensely lucrative. The more original the idea, the more lucrative.

  You don’t need to have a lot of great ideas to get immensely rich. Just one, really. As long as you also manage to consider all the angles and get there early, preferably first. Plenty of people have great ideas, lying on the couch. The trick is getting up.

  She’d already had her one great idea, and she’d executed it with full vigor. But she’d been overconfident, and this hubris had cost her everything. Almost everything.

  This is her second great idea, and she probably won’t get a third chance. She’s not making the same mistakes this time.

  * * *

  She tries to relax. Inhales slowly, deeply, lets her head fall back, stretching out her tense neck muscles.

  This living room is huge, with three different seating areas, two fireplaces, French doors to a balcony perched over the campo, half-shaded at this hour by the low angle of the sun. She stares up at the coffered ceiling, they’re all spectacular in this apartment, different in every room. The master bedroom has a fantastic fresco painted onto a plaster oval, mountains and streams, blue skies and puffy clouds and chubby cheerful cherubim. Lots to look at when you’re fucking in missionary position. But recently there’d been precious little of that in the king-size bed with the brocade cover, not with the copulatory consequence in the adjoining bedroom, screaming and shitting up a storm.

  Nothing is quite as desexualizing as parenting an infant.

  Plus her husband has slept in this bed a grand total of three nights in the past month.

  She keeps refreshing one window, keeping herself logged into the account that holds the greatest volume of put options. Waiting for the signal.

  This old building is one of many in Venice whose ownership has recently changed hands. The new owner is awaiting permits to renovate, to transition the building from long-term rentals into much more enriching short-term tourist housing. In the meantime everything is falling apart, walls crumbling, electricity fizzling, pipes leaking. At first glance this place looks like luxury, but after ten minutes the decay becomes evident. Just like the entire city, increasingly unable to provide the things that residents need but tourists don’t, groceries and hardware and fresh fish.

  Venice may have once been a world capital, but that was a thousand years ago, Marco Polo’s day. In the past few decades the population has fallen by half, and within another twenty years basically no one will live here anymore, it’ll be just tourists who sleep on the main islands, in hotels and hostels and apartments like this one, while every night all the Italians will sleep across the lagoon in Mestre, which is nobody’s idea of a pretty place.

  The baby’s noise has become louder. It’s touch-and-go.

  For all the fanny-packed visitors discharged from all the mega–cruise ships, for all the rising fetid waters and skyrocketing rents and disappearing services, the beauty is still beyond compare. Venice is a spectacular place to wait it out, to meld into the mass of foreigners, the constant churn of a city whose population turns over every single day, tens of thousands of new faces. A place where familiar faces are noticeable. If someone shows up here, looking for her, she’ll know it.

>   She packed her bag last night, then stopped by Lorenzo’s shop just before closing to confirm that he’ll be available to give her a ride. Family problems, she said. She might need to leave on short notice. Tonight.

  “Certo,” Lorenzo said. She paid him a hundred euros per month, for various favors. For reliability.

  * * *

  Off to the side, a few prepaid mobiles are plugged into their chargers, lights glowing, awaiting different pieces of information. One of these phones chimes, delivering the expected update. She turns back to her larger screen, the trackpad, the little cursor blinking, winking at her, in on the whole scheme.

  She hits EXECUTE, and waits for the screen to refresh. Then she needs to move the cursor to another spot, where she clicks another button: CONFIRM.

  She stares at the little animation that signals that something is in the process of happening, but hasn’t yet happened…

  Not yet…

  Not yet…

  Then it does. Your transaction is complete, here is the confirmation number, thank you for your business.

  That’s done. It’s not until she exhales that she realizes she’d been holding her breath.

  Even in a modest boat like Lorenzo’s, you can get to dozens of countries, the Balkans, even North Africa, the Mediterranean Mideast. Down to Sicily or over to Greece. Or instead you could drive up into the Alps, to Switzerland, Liechtenstein, the Black Forest. Or fly anywhere. Venice presents a lot of options, to a lot of destinations. A lot of ways to lose a trail, or create a false one. An easy place from which to escape.

  12

  PARIS. 9:24 A.M.

  The crowd is large at this hour, with the eager hordes who showed up early plus all the people showing up now as the doors open, streaming in from all directions, everybody wants to be here bright and early, go get a glimpse of that famous smile.

  Mahmoud walks through the opening in the temporary fence, which is perhaps no longer temporary. Portable, but permanent.

  There is no one at this fence to challenge him.

  Sculptural-looking concrete blocks are scattered around the central plaza. Tourists stand atop these sturdy forms, balancing themselves in silly positions, or holding up thumbs and forefingers to create a trick of perspective for the benefit of cameras, a novelty shot that is not so novel when thousands of people take it every day.

  These protective bollards are another layer of fortification to prevent attack by vehicle, the manner of assault that happened in Nice, in New York. Or to prevent something even more devastating: an armored vehicle delivering a bomb, or an armored vehicle that itself is a bomb. Or a whole fleet of vehicles. Perhaps not even for the purpose of mass killing, but for mass theft, or mass destruction. The treasures here are, literally, priceless. That is why all these people have come. That is why Mahmoud has come.

  Yes, these concrete pillars are for protection.

  Ha.

  * * *

  The crowd’s collective energy is impatient. Mahmoud feels the humanity thrumming around him, enveloping him, all these heartbeats, all this flesh. He pushes past people, not worried about seeming rude, and suddenly finds himself on the periphery of a large group of children, it is obviously a school group, there must be a hundred little kids, paired off, holding hands.

  When he was approaching, this area looked like a depression in the crowd, perhaps a roped-off section, or another big fountain, someplace where it would be impossible for people to be standing. But there are plenty of people standing here, they are just small people, so Mahmoud could not see them.

  Back home, he had been an average-size adult male. But here in well-fed Western Europe he is a short man, slight, narrow-shouldered and pencil-armed, even his hair seems thinner here. Everyone in Paris looks like they could beat him up, even the women.

  It had not occurred to Mahmoud that there would be little kids here, but of course there are. Probably to see the mummies, overseen by these young women, schoolteachers.

  Mahmoud has two little children himself. And his wife, she is a schoolteacher.

  He surveys the plaza, the familiar shapes whose most famous incarnations preside over a stretch of desert not far from where he was born, where he lived most of his life, in the southern sprawl of the largest city in the Arab world. Those three immense structures in Giza are made of stone. The four here in Paris are much smaller, and made of glass.

  Was, he has to remind himself. Was a schoolteacher.

  Mahmoud arrives to his assigned destination, the only statue in the courtyard, King Louis XIV on his rearing horse. Mahmoud stops walking and waits, strapped into one bomb and carrying another, in the epicenter of Western civilization.

  13

  PARIS. 9:25 A.M.

  “Dex?”

  He doesn’t look up from the paper. “Hmm?”

  “You’re going to remember Ben’s present, right?”

  An inflexible little-boy birthday request, a much coveted toy—a set of movie tie-in Lego—that has proven hard to find. Dexter should have bought it long ago, or ordered it online; neither the birthday nor the request snuck up. Now he’s out of time. A small chore, something he promised to take care of, then didn’t. It infuriates her.

  “Yes.”

  “Really, Dex?”

  “Trust me.”

  Kate sighs audibly, a huff of unambiguous displeasure. Dexter chooses to ignore it, and she chooses to leave it at that, unwilling to escalate, at least not at the moment. Maybe later. Especially if it turns out that he’ll be unable to find the right box of Danish plastic, which is an outcome that Kate might even be rooting for, it will serve him right, and she will be justified in her sanctimony. There’s very little as satisfying as irrefutable spousal self-righteousness.

  They sit silently, stewing in the kind of spat that’s undetectable if you’re not in the marriage, not exhaustively versed in its history, the prior mistakes and misrepresentations and errors of judgment and honesty, the full set of luggage that comes with sharing a life.

  Dexter hands the French newspaper to Kate. It’s a small gesture, but better than nothing. He moves on to the International New York Times.

  They sip their coffees, read their papers, in silence. Dexter has never been the most talkative of men, but for the past days he’s been especially uncommunicative. Which makes Kate wonder, worry: again?

  She tries to brush aside that thought. Again.

  But her ire is up, and she refuses to say thanks for the paper. Punishing him, is what she’s doing. But he probably doesn’t realize he’s being punished. In fact—in fact—he might even think he’s being rewarded, afforded a little peace and quiet for once.

  Goddamn it.

  She flings aside a page without having finished the article she was in the middle of not reading.

  * * *

  Like Kate’s, Dexter’s workday skews late. Some days they barely overlap. This led to problems back in Luxembourg, where neither had much idea what the other one did all day.

  When she took this new position, she tried to be more up-front. There would be travel in this job, she told Dexter, for indefinite duration, to destinations that she wouldn’t necessarily be able to divulge. There would be secrets. She couldn’t answer most questions, so she’d appreciate it if he wouldn’t ask. She didn’t want to have to lie to him, she didn’t want him to have to pretend to believe her lies. Wouldn’t they be better off if they just skipped all the lying?

  But he did need to know her cover story. Enough to be able to answer casual questions, or, in a dire situation, noncasual ones. He needed to know enough to be credible.

  “You’re a consultant?”

  “That’s right.”

  Most people in Paris don’t talk about work, at least not cocktail-party acquaintances; too bourge. But that French anti-bourgeois sentiment doesn’t fully penetrate the expat bubble,
so Kate needed to be prepared for people to ask her “What do you do for a living?” and not be content with a one-line answer. They might ask Dexter too. And it might not always be casual chitchatters.

  “And what is it you consult about?”

  “Political-economic issues in France.”

  “Really?”

  It was a ludicrous question. She didn’t answer.

  “And who are your clients?”

  “Large US-based multinationals.”

  Kate had planned for this conversation. She’d made an occasion of it, a favorite bistro, dark wood and yellow walls and old brass sconces. She sat on the red velvet banquette, the same color as the restaurant’s name in extravagant script decorating the china.

  “Such as?”

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge the identity of my clients.”

  “Why not?”

  “NDAs as a matter of blanket policy. To prevent any misunderstandings.”

  The menu featured all the greatest hits. Kate was having coq au vin, trying to figure out how to make it herself. Following a recipe wasn’t always enough.

  “And what is it that these clients expect from your consultancy?”

  “That, too, is something I’ve promised not to dis—”

  “Okay, I get it. But just between us.”

  “Just between us? What does that even mean in this situation? Seriously?”

  Dexter looked past her, to the rear wall with floral wallpaper. The tablecloths were white, the silver old and slightly tarnished, the waiters wearing black and white, formal yet discrete and agreeable.

  “Listen, Dex, I wouldn’t answer that question, so you wouldn’t know the answer. Let’s just keep it that way. Let’s not invent more lies than we need to.”

  “But do you have an answer?”