The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  CAPRI

  The American woman glances at her buzzing phone, an incoming text message from her husband, a photo of a pretty place. Wish you were here. How’s Istanbul?

  She looks around this cliffside terrace, a picture-postcard view of the sea, the cliffs of Capri, the Sorrento Peninsula in the distance, the Amalfi coast, Positano, storied places. She arrived here just a couple hours ago after two planes, a ferry, and a taxi.

  She checks the weather app on her phone, the forecast for Istanbul.

  Humid, rainy, gross, she types. Wish I was there.

  She puts down her phone. Lights a cigarette, suppresses a cough. Jesus, how do people smoke these things? But cigarettes present a lot of opportunities. For example: to stand, to saunter across the terrace, where she collects an ashtray from a different table, all of this activity affording her the excuse to scout her surroundings.

  She carries the ashtray to the low wall that separates the terrazzo from the hundreds of feet of nearly vertical cliff down to the boulders of the shoreline. It’s not a serviceable beach down there, offering no access to any outpost of humanity, no road or path. Just wild seacoast, severe and beautiful and perfect.

  “Un’altra limonata, Signora Delgado?” the waitress asks. Marina Delgado is the name she’s using here in Italy; that’s even what she’s calling herself in her head. Marina Delgado.

  “Sì, grazie.” She had a friend in middle school named Marina, which makes it easier.

  There are eleven hotel guests lounging on the floral-print canvas cushions that match the umbrellas, surrounded by ceramic planters of cactus and lavender, and wrought-iron table frames topped with pebbled glass holding beaded drinks and glossy magazines and folded eyeglasses. Marina herself is wearing giant sunglasses, frames that cover half her face. She’s not recognizable, not unless someone is looking for her, and no one would be.

  There are more luxurious hotels on the island. Better restaurants. Bigger suites and grander lobbies and more resourceful concierges. What this hotel offers is this landscaped platform hundreds of feet above the Tyrrhenian, facing the craggy cliffs that rise dramatically from the azure sea dotted with sailboats and speedboats, the mainland on the horizon. It doesn’t get any prettier. If you stay in this hotel, you lie on this terrace. That’s the point.

  Right now there’s a German couple out here, both tall and pink and muscled.

  A fat mustached man who looks possibly Spanish.

  A pair of teenage girls, both staring at their devices, the view and surroundings lost to them, inhabiting social-media worlds, the locale nothing in its own right, just another selfie backdrop, here I am, please look at me, tell me you like me.

  Another pair of middle-aged women—the girls’ mothers?—are sitting far away, giving the girls privacy, talking in hushed tones, exchanging bits of gossip, mortifying anecdotes about other teenage girls, their bad choices and predictable outcomes.

  A trio of pensioners, perhaps a married couple with a spinster sister.

  Marina is the eleventh person, just another scantily clad woman reading fashion magazines and smoking cigarettes on a chaise longue at a fancy hotel. Noticeable, but also ordinary. There are always people like her in places like this.

  Now a twelfth person arrives, wearing one of the hotel’s sea-green terry-cloth robes, ostentatious gold crest embroidered on the breast.

  Marina feels her pulse accelerating while she delays looking directly at the newcomer, until she can’t help herself anymore, and then from the safety of her sunglasses she redirects her eyes to examine his face—

  But no.

  ARGENTINA

  Will rides horses at an estancia, learns to rustle livestock, to milk cows at sunrise. He looks the lamb in the eye before the farmer slits its throat and hangs the carcass from the rafters, draining blood into a dented tin bucket.

  The next night they grill the lamb on an iron spit over a wood fire in an open pit, and eat big chunks, hewn by a machete, accompanied by an unlabeled bottle of young Malbec from the neighboring finca.

  Will can now go an entire day without thinking about Elle, who’s fading into his past, dragging his guilt out with her receding tide. He’ll be fine.

  CAPRI

  The ice in her drink melts. The late-afternoon wind picks up, flapping the umbrellas, blowing around the cellophane wrapping of a cigarette packet. The magazine slips from her lap and tumbles to the terra-cotta tiles.

  Marina wakes with a start, momentarily unaware of where she is, of who she is, with the dry pucker of a jet-lagged mouth. She takes a swig of her watery warm limonata, and runs her tongue around the inside of her mouth, rubs the sleep out of her eyes.

  She looks around the patio, whose contents have shifted somewhat during her unintentional nap. There’s a new person out here. A man, white hair, late-middle-aged but very fit, virile looking, confident.

  She gathers her wits, focuses her mind. She carefully examines the other guests, a somewhat different crowd from before she fell asleep, and the waitress, and the pool boy. She checks the time, checks her messages. Thinks through her plan, yet again, step one and step two, steps three and four and five, up through eighteen, all the things she’s going to do, and when, and what alternatives she’ll pursue if something goes wrong, her mind buzzing, her body coming alive—

  And then: stop.

  Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Just like yoga. Except sort of the opposite.

  She taps a cigarette out of the packet. Tries the lighter once, twice, failing to ignite. She shakes the thing, and flicks her thumb across the wheel again, again, again, growing visibly frustrated. “Fuck,” she mutters.

  Marina glances around the terrace, as if she’s searching for evidence of other smokers, but that’s just pretend, she already knows what she’s going to find, and where. She stands and adjusts her bikini, a garment that no one, anywhere, would consider modest. She can feel the man’s eyes turn her way, an instinctive reaction.

  She takes a step, pauses, as if reconsidering. She bends over—again, confident that she’s drawing attention—and plucks up a towel, wraps it around her waist. She wants to be seen to be a woman who doesn’t want to seem titillating on an outrageous level.

  She walks across the tiles, one foot and then another, repeat, repeat, and remember to breathe evenly, in, out, in, out.

  “Scusi?” She smiles down at this man, but not too warmly. A perfunctory smile is what she’s going for, the type of smile a pretty young woman gives a man because she wants something, and thinks she has to be nice to get it. “Parla inglese?”

  “Yes,” he says, “I do.” He’s better-looking than she expected.

  “Might I use your lighter? Mine seems to be, um, dead.”

  “Of course.” The heavy gold lighter has a smooth action, a steady blue flame, a pleasant click when the cover closes. This lighter is not to her taste, but she’d like to keep it anyway. Maybe she will, a souvenir. Though that’s obviously a mistake.

  “Grazie,” she says, then returns to her chaise, walking slowly.

  Step three: complete.

  ARGENTINA

  “This certainly seems like quite a life,” Will says, looking over the wide-open expanse of the plains, seemingly limitless, boundless, anything possible. The two nearest big cities, Buenos Aires and Santiago, are both five hundred miles away. “What the American West used to be, before it became shopping malls and call centers.”

  Fernando doesn’t understand this, but doesn’t bother asking for clarification. It’s not part of his job description.

  “Are there any Americans living out here? Retirees? Old people?”

  “Sí.”

  “Do you think we could find any? I’d like to talk to some.”

  So they go see the middle-aged couple from Nevada who bought a working cattle ranch, turned it into a bed-and-breakfast, but almost no one comes. A few towns away is a woman who left Palm Beach when she fell in love with a polo player, followed him to B.A. and got pr
egnant and then jilted, and moved out here to a new friend’s guesthouse to raise her child, a horrifically thought-out parenting decision after what was clearly a long series of other ill-considered lifestyle choices.

  “Want a glass of something?” she asks. Will is afraid of her, and her poor decision-making rubric. “The kid is asleep.”

  Will begs off, returns to the quiet ranch, an arthritic little terrier named Chico at his side while he writes, trying to stick to his regimen. Then he goes to sleep alone, in the middle of nowhere, far from home, again.

  MENDOZA

  The representative from the hotel chain is, as usual, a good-looking young woman, efficient and informative, an adequate guide and a companionable companion. She shows Will around the city, then drives out to their new flagship property in the nearby countryside, a sprawling lodge nestled in vineyards, with polo fields and a stocked lake and eighteen holes of golf, the Andes in the distance below a deep cerulean sky.

  Will grabs a nap and a jog, a shower and a shave, a fresh shirt and tie, shoes shined.

  “Bienvenidos, Señor Rhodes.” The restaurant hostess smiles warmly, big white teeth and jet-black hair. “Please, this way.” She leads Will across the fussy room, around a corner, down a few tiled steps, and through a wide wood-framed entryway into the large private dining room, already populated by people with glasses in their hands. Directly in front of Will is a blonde in a snug dress, facing away. A waiter hands Will a glass.

  “Gracias,” Will says, and at the sound of his voice the blonde slowly turns, and looks over her shoulder—

  CAPRI

  It’s dark when she returns to the hotel, a harrowing taxi ride up the narrow winding road from the lively town where she had dinner.

  “Buona sera,” she says to the girl at the front desk, dark hair and green eyes and the look of someone who’d much rather be doing anything else.

  “Buona sera Signora Delgado.”

  She continues through the dining room. Earlier, when she was reserving a table that she ultimately canceled, she’d glanced at the reservation book. So she knows that the white-haired man had an eight o’clock, so he should be finishing soon. She’s confident that he’ll be facing the door, which means that at this very moment he’s watching her walk by.

  What does he see? He sees her stumble, like a woman who’s had too much to drink. He sees her reach down to remove one heel, then the other. He watches her exit the dining room on the far side, no doubt heading to the terrace, a young woman traveling alone in a romantic hotel, maybe suffering from a recent heartbreak, tipsy and vulnerable…

  The breakfast room is empty, dimly lit. She drops her shoes into her voluminous handbag, and removes a simple-looking little box, six sides of stainless steel, one facet of which features a single switch, On-Off. She turns the switch to On. As she walks past the long buffet table, she sets this cube behind a tall vase of flowers, ten feet from where the wireless camera is mounted on the wall. The range of the device is supposedly fifty feet, but with these things it’s always preferable to be closer, safer.

  She uses her shoulder to push through the terrace door, and rushes around to the side gate, where she places a second small cube. Then she finds a seat, orders a bottle of house red from a waitress.

  When the wine arrives she immediately dumps some of it into a potted plant, then a splash into her glass. She swirls the liquid, coating the glass, its rim. She takes a tiny sip, just enough to get the wine’s color on her lips, on the rim. She’s not drinking alcohol tonight.

  She double-checks the view from the retaining wall. There’s nothing she can see down there now, pitch-black. She searches for lights, for signs of habitation that were invisible in daylight, hidden among the dense vegetation. There appears to be a house off to the west, but not close enough to be an issue.

  Okay, she thinks. There’s nothing left to check, nothing left to plan. Nothing left to do but execute. She takes a deep, deep breath, and she waits.

  MENDOZA

  Will’s mouth is hanging open.

  “Fancy,” she says, “meeting you here.”

  “My God” is all he can manage.

  “Well, Goddess, if you want to be precise. And I know you do.”

  They’re still standing in the dining room’s doorway. She leans toward him and he reciprocates, purses his lips into the air near her ear, as he would to thousands of other women. But he can feel her actual lips settle on his cheek, and rest on his skin for a second longer than they should.

  “But who’m I to split hairs?” Looking him in the eye, clear and confident, holding him with a firmish fist encircling his arm, something of a caress with the side of her thumb.

  He’d been working hard to pull his wife back into the forefront of his sexual consciousness. And he’d been succeeding, almost.

  “In any case,” she says, “it is lovely to see you, Will Rhodes. I wasn’t sure I’d ever again have this particular pleasure. But why are you here?”

  “Should I not be?”

  “I thought you were European correspondent?”

  “Well, Argentina is sort of European, isn’t it?”

  She squints at him.

  “Our Americas man isn’t terribly expert in wine, and that’s putting it diplomatically. And we’re looking for a wine story. So they sent me.”

  “You’re a wine expert? You speak Spanish?”

  “Pfft. This is Argentina. I’m getting by.”

  “Yes,” Elle says, a mischievous grin sliding across her lips. “I’m quite sure you are.”

  —

  This night, in this hemisphere, it’s a much smaller table, just eight people. There’s a lot of Spanish being spoken, too much for Will and Elle to fully engage in the conversational flow, so they turn to each other by necessity as well as preference.

  It becomes another of those nights, hard to keep track of the food courses, the talk progressively looser and looser, with more and more laughter, with touching on the forearm and the wrist, two hands brushing. Elle glances down at the incidental contact, which was maybe not so incidental. “You have nice hands,” she says, staring down at them. “Like a pianist. Or a pickpocket.”

  The already-thin ice, Will knows, is cracking.

  —

  Dinner is breaking up. People are exchanging business cards, shaking hands, promising to follow up about something or other, that lodge in Chile’s Lake District, the winemaker who’s doing interesting things in Extremadura.

  Elle arches her eyebrow at Will. Damn that sexy eyebrow. “Won’t you join me for the superfluous drink you know you want?”

  Will can pretend to himself whatever the hell he wants to pretend, but he knows what she’s asking. And he knows what his answer should be. But instead “Yes” is what he says.

  They perch on plush seats in the lobby bar, consume I-don’t-want-this-night-to-end drinks, accompanied by an unburdening of her past romances and disappointments, a conversation that’s an unabashed invitation to intimacy, a second-date conversation and all that accompanies it—the flush, the butterflies, just like when he was fifteen years old, or twenty-five, but now at thirty-five he hasn’t been on a second date in a long time, and he’d forgotten this part of it. Maybe he’ll still feel this way at eighty-five? Or is this the last time he’ll ever feel this way? Last times are obvious only in hindsight.

  One A.M. sneaks up. The lobby is deserted now except for the night manager at the desk, who’s looking down at something, probably his phone. The front doors are still open, the armed security guard leaning against a pillar out there.

  “So,” Elle says, but there’s suddenly nothing left to say, now that they’ve shed the bartender’s distant company, his implicit chaperoning. The talking portion of the night is finished. What remains to be seen is if there will be another portion of the night.

  “Well,” he says. “I guess this is good night.” He can’t bring himself to meet her eye.

  “I’m down this corridor,” she says. “You?�
�

  Will reaches into his pocket, removes the big leather fob. Number 32. “I don’t know.” The number doesn’t explain enough, and he can’t remember, and he’s confused.

  “You are too,” she says.

  Has he ever done anything this hard? What has been more difficult than standing in this empty secluded corridor, late at night, alone with this beautiful woman who wants him—who has already invited him to bed—and not kissing her?

  I am not a cheater, he thinks. I’m not.

  But Will can feel the pull of her, gravitational, and the pre-kiss buzz in his head is deafening. He tries but fails to think of something that’s not her, and the more he tries, the more insistent the images become, rapidly escalating from romantic to pornographic, the shape of her breasts, the scent of her, the feel as he slides—

  Will turns halfway to Elle as she’s already turning to him, both of them having made the same decision at the same moment, and neither needs to move feet to lean in, mouth on mouth, but bodies not touching.

  Elle disengages her lips. She walks away, down the carpeted hall, without saying anything, leaving him standing there alone, arguing with himself…

  CAPRI

  The man is approaching slowly, cupping his postprandial cigarette at an upward angle, sheltering it from the wind, maybe a bit overprotective, or self-conscious. “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?” The trace of a Midwestern accent, but hard to place.

  “Oh,” she says, “I guess so.” She’s a dejected woman, not contemplating beauty. She’s out here wallowing, is what she’s doing.

  “Do you mind if I join you?”

  She opens her mouth but hesitates visibly before saying, “Sure.”

  He extends his hand, says, “My name is Sean.” She knows this is not true. Sean Cullen is one of his many aliases. In the Spanish Pyrénées, he was apparently calling himself Taylor Lindhurst.