The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  Throughout it all, Hayden had been right here.

  “Love Munich,” he said. “Here, let me show you some smaller pictures.”

  Kate followed him into a cozy room, one of the northern galleries that faced the entrance plaza, now in the full shadow of gloaming. He walked past the paintings, to the window. She followed his gaze to a man leaning against a lamppost in the foreground of the vast cold plaza, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the windows. Looking up at them.

  “So how was the Romantische Straße? The children must’ve loved that silly castle Neuschwanstein. They’re how old?”

  “Five and four.”

  “Time flies.” Although Hayden had no children of his own, he recognized that many people, at a certain point in their lives, begin to measure time not by their own forward progress but by the ages of their children.

  Hayden was still looking out the window, watching the man in the plaza. A woman hurried down the steps. The man stopped leaning on the lamppost. As the woman neared, he tossed his cigarette, and locked arms with her, and they walked together, away. Kate wondered if she and Dexter would ever again walk arm in arm, as they had when they were first dating.

  Hayden turned from the window, and approached a small, tidy, dark still-life. A little Flemish masterpiece of light and shadow. “The tallest people in the world,” he said, “are the Dutch. Six-one, on average.”

  “For men?”

  “For the whole lot of them. Men and women.”

  “Hmm. That’s a five.”

  “Five? That’s all? You’re tough.” He shrugged. “So, what can I do for you?”

  Kate reached into the inside pocket of her tweed jacket, handed over the print, the candid photo taken in that Parisian nightclub, seemingly ages ago, but in reality only a month and a half in the past.

  Hayden barely glanced at the print before putting it in his pocket. He didn’t want to be seen standing in a museum, looking at a photo in his hand.

  “There’s a phone number on the back.”

  “A prepaid mobile?”

  “That’s right,” she answered, blushing in anticipation of the criticism he was about to level at her. But Hayden could see in her blush that she was already punishing herself for using her home phone to set up this meeting; he didn’t need to mention it.

  “Do you know who they are?” Kate asked.

  “Should I?”

  “I thought maybe they’re with us.”

  “They’re not.”

  The family with the young children—French—was now in the adjoining gallery. In the gallery beyond the French, maybe sixty yards away, another lone man stood with his back to Kate, wearing his overcoat. He was even wearing a hat, a brown fedora. Indoors.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “As sure as one can be.”

  Kate wasn’t entirely convinced, but at the moment there was nothing further she could do about it. “The man on the right is my husband.” She spoke quietly, nearly a whisper, but careful not to actually whisper. Whispers drew attention. “The man on the left calls himself Bill Maclean, a currency trader from Chicago, now living in Luxembourg.”

  They started walking again through another well-lit southern gallery, their footsteps echoing through the immense room, under the gaze of saints and martyrs and angels.

  “He’s not?”

  “No.”

  Hayden walked by another Rubens, The Fall of the Damned.

  Kate glanced up at the painting, horrors upon horrors. “The woman is supposedly his wife, Julia. A little younger than Bill. A Chicago-based decorator.”

  Hayden paused, gazing up at The Sacrifice of Isaac. Abraham was about to kill his only son, his hand covering the young man’s eyes completely, shielding Isaac from his imminent fate. But an angel had arrived just in time, grabbing the old man’s wrist. The blade falling away, airborne, still dangerous looking, this free-floating weapon. A rogue knife.

  “Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking?” Hayden asked.

  Kate continued to look up at the immense Rembrandt, at the range of emotion on old Abraham’s face, the horror and grief but also relief. “These people are not who they claim to be,” she said. “Those are not their names. Not their careers.”

  She turned her eyes from the canvas to Hayden, and caught a glimpse of the other man, crossing a doorway, a hint of his profile, not enough …

  “So?” Hayden asked. “Who are they? What’s your theory? What are we looking for?”

  “I think,” she said, voice as low as possible, “they’re going to assassinate someone.”

  Hayden raised his eyebrows.

  “I know it sounds dubious.”

  “But?”

  “But they live across the street from the monarch’s palace, with a perfect vantage on multiple unprotected areas. And the security is pitiful. The palace has all the trappings of a secure environment, except for the actual security. If you were looking for one really great place to kill someone, this would be it. If you were looking for a venue to take out a very high-value target—a president, a prime minister—you couldn’t ask for much better.”

  “Can’t that just be coincidence?”

  “Sure. Their apartment is a nice place to live. But they have weapons. At least one.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen the gun.”

  “I have a gun. You too, maybe. And we’re not going to assassinate anyone.”

  Kate gave him a what-are-you-kidding look.

  “Are we?”

  “Come on. You know what I’m saying.”

  “All right,” he admitted. “I’ll grant you that the weapon warrants some suspicion. But there are hundreds of reasons why someone would have a weapon—”

  “An American? In Europe?”

  “—and only one of them is assassination.”

  “Yes, but very few of those reasons are good.”

  Hayden shrugged, screwed up his face in a way that suggested he had an opinion he was reluctant to share.

  “And what about the false names?” Kate asked.

  “Please. Who doesn’t have a false name?”

  “Normal bankers moving to Luxembourg, that’s who.” Kate was losing patience; Hayden didn’t seem willing to admit even a possibility that these people were killers. “I’ve known quite a few assassins in my time.”

  “So have I.”

  “And you know that this is how they operate; this is what they do.”

  In fact, this is exactly what they’d done when Kate hired a team to take out a Salvadoran general. They’d rented a house up the beach from where they knew the general would turn up, sooner or later: a Barbados vacation villa owned by the general’s primary arms dealer. The team ended up needing to wait nearly two months, developing deep, rich suntans, and vastly improving their golf games. They even learned to surf.

  Finally one evening, at cocktail hour, the woman pushed the nose of her rifle out the second-floor bathroom window, and took a fairly easy three-hundred-yard shot—she could’ve hit her mark at twice the distance, maybe thrice—across one rooftop into the pristinely manicured beachfront garden where the general was reclined on a chaise, a bottle of Banks beer in his hand, and suddenly a large hole in the middle of his head. The other half of the team had the engine running, bags in the trunk, private jet waiting on the tarmac on the east side of the island, thirty minutes away from the brand-new crime scene at Payne’s Bay.

  Kate caught another glimpse of the man in the other gallery. She kept the corner of her eye on him. “And something happened in Paris. We were attacked late at night, and he fought off the muggers … his behavior was too, I don’t know, too …”

  “Too professional?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, I’ll indulge you: if they are assassins, who’s their target?”

  “No idea. But there are important people traipsing through the palace all the time.”

  “That doesn’t exactly narrow it down, does
it?”

  Kate shook her head.

  “Listen, I don’t … how can I put this? … I don’t think it’s credible that anyone would hire assassins in a man-and-wife team for—how long has this been going on?”

  “About three months.”

  “For a quarter-year, on the chance that this arrangement will eventually afford a takeable shot on, frankly, anyone. No matter how insufficient you think the security is at this palace, an entire different level can be established anywhere, at any time, in forty-eight hours.”

  She saw the man in the other gallery move closer.

  “I’m sorry,” Hayden continued. “I agree that these characters sound suspicious. But I think you’ve misread the situation. They’re not assassins.”

  Kate suddenly knew that of course he was right. She couldn’t believe she’d invested so much in such a harebrained theory; that she’d so willfully constructed a scenario so obviously contrary to fact. She’d been an idiot.

  So why were the Macleans in Luxembourg? Kate’s consciousness chased something into a corner of her mind, a dark corner that she tried—but rarely succeeded—to forget.

  “And if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Yes?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  Kate couldn’t think of an answer other than the truth, which was something she couldn’t admit: that she was afraid they were pursuing her, because of the Torres debacle.

  “You might want to just let this go,” Hayden said.

  She turned to him, saw the look of warning. “Why?”

  “You might not like what you find.”

  Kate searched Hayden’s face for more, but he wasn’t giving it. And she couldn’t ask for it without explaining why.

  “I have to.”

  He stared at her, waiting for her to elaborate. But she waited him out.

  “Okay.” Hayden reached into his pocket, removed the photo, and handed it back to her. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I’m sure you understand.”

  Kate was expecting this. Hayden had become an important person in Europe; he couldn’t afford to walk down blind alleys.

  The hat-wearing man was now in a different adjoining gallery, his back still to them. Kate took a couple steps around the perimeter of the room, trying to get a look at his face.

  “How long are you in München?”

  They walked into the next gallery, passing the young family and their security-guard escort. Hayden stopped in front of a Rembrandt. Kate looked around but didn’t see the fedora’d stranger. And then she did, in the adjoining room.

  “We’re leaving the day after tomorrow,” she said. “We’re going to Bamberg for a day, then home. Back to Lux.”

  “Beautiful little city. You’d love Bamberg. But.”

  She turned to him. “Yes?”

  “Instead you could go to Berlin. To see a guy.”

  THE MAN IN the next room was edging closer, now in a position that seemed an awful lot like he was trying to listen to their conversation.

  Kate widened her eyes at Hayden, and inclined her head toward the adjoining gallery. Hayden understood, gave Kate a nod. He quickly glided to the wall, his soles falling silent on the floor, his body springing into tightly controlled, elegant action. Standing stock-still, in his foppish clothes and fussy hair, Hayden had looked like any other middle-aged man. But something else was visible in his gait, in the way he waved his arm to point at a painting. Like Travolta, near-dancing in Pulp Fiction, the coiled energy visible just below the surface. Now, sprung into action, Hayden was singularly spry. He slid into the next large gallery, while Kate hustled to the smaller one.

  She saw nothing. Kate looked both ways down the long hall, windows on one side, unseen galleries on the other.

  No one.

  She started walking. In the next gallery she glimpsed Hayden in the adjoining large one, the two of them making parallel pushes, pursuing, flushing.

  But still no one.

  Kate sped up, now hearing the sound of the French schoolboys, and she caught a flash of an overcoat sweeping through a door, and the Japanese startled at Hayden rushing past, but no sign of the overcoat, and Kate moved faster now, the building coming to an end, the top of the stairs, she turned a corner and looked down—

  There he was, taking the last few steps at the bottom of the sweeping staircase, turning the corner, his coat trailing after him.

  Kate and Hayden ran down the stairs, a security guard yelling at them—Halt!—and turned the corner and descended more stairs and another corner and then the lobby was spread out below them, and they froze, breathing heavy.

  They were looking at a huge room that they’d last seen empty. It was now packed, the population of multiple tour buses disgorged here, hundreds of people in coats and hats, buying tickets and queuing for the coat check, seated on benches and standing.

  Kate scanned the crowd, walking slowly to change her vantage, Hayden strolling in the opposite direction. They descended the steps at opposite sides of the room and waded through the crowd, retired Germans from the provinces, checked wool coats and loden pants and sheepy-looking scarves, beer on breath, hearty laughing and red cheeks and thin flyaway hair.

  Kate caught a glimpse of something on the far side of the crowd, and she anxiously pushed her way through the thick humanity—“Excuse me, bitte, excuse me”—until she was at the glass front doors, watching the man in the flowing overcoat and brown fedora near the end of the plaza as a car pulled to a stop in front of him. He climbed into the driver-side backseat, his face still turned away.

  As the car pulled from the curb, the driver turned toward the museum for a split second before returning her eyes forward to her route in the Theresienstraße. It was a woman wearing big sunglasses.

  The car was a hundred yards away, and the light was dim, but still Kate was pretty sure that the driver was Julia.

  “IT SEEMS LIKE we should go,” Kate said. “When’s the next time we’re going to be this far east?” They were walking through the Englischer Garten in the failing light, a landscape of browns and grays, an infinitely intricate latticework of leafless branches silhouetted against the silvery sky. “Otherwise, we’ll have to fly. And let’s face it, we’re not going to buy four plane tickets to Berlin.”

  “But then why wasn’t Berlin a part of our original itinerary?” Dexter asked, fairly.

  Frozen grass crunched underfoot. The boys were scouring the ground for acorns, which they were shoving into their pockets. It was some sort of competition. “I wasn’t looking at the whole of Germany.”

  “I have to work on Monday.”

  “But you can do that from Berlin, right?”

  Dexter ignored her rebuttal. “And this’ll be another two days of missed school. You know I don’t like that.”

  They walked down a swale and up again, Kate’s feet slipping in the slick piles of leaves. “I do know that,” she said. “And I agree. But this is preschool.”

  “For Ben. But it’s kindergarten for Jake.”

  Kate glared at him. Did Dexter imagine she didn’t actually know what grade Jake was in? She struggled to ignore the condescending remark; a fight would be counterproductive. She answered as levelly as she could, “I know.” Her breath emerged in big white puffs in the cold dry air. “But this is why we wanted to live in Europe. For us and for the kids: to go everywhere, see everything. So let’s see Berlin. Jake can get back to his ABCs on Wednesday.”

  Kate knew that she didn’t have a moral leg to stand on. Her position was indefensible, and she hated defending it, pretending that something was for the children’s good when it was really just something she needed. Or just wanted. This was the specific type of dreadful feeling that she’d hoped to avoid by quitting the Company. The exact type of lie for which she’d thrown over her career to not utter.

  They paused at the edge of an iced-over pond, the shoreline buttressed by boulders, long low branches dipping down to rest on the glassy surface.

  Dext
er put his arm around Kate as they gazed at the serene, frigid tableau. They rubbed shoulders up and down for warmth. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to Berlin.”

  KATE FORCED THE boys to pose at Checkpoint Charlie, in front of the YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR sign on Friedrichstraße. Kennedy was here in ’63, on the same visit that included his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, delivered down in Schöneberg. Then in ’87, up at the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan challenged Gorbachev to tear down this wall.

  Americans liked to deliver bombastic speeches here in Berlin. Kate followed that tradition with an impassioned version of her stump, If You Don’t Start Behaving Right This Instant. It was probably the chocolate that was the culprit, she announced. So a solution could be that they never eat chocolate, ever again, in their entire lives.

  Their eyes were wide with terror; Ben started to cry. Kate relented, as usual, with a variation on “That’s not what I want. So don’t make me do it.”

  They quickly recovered, as they always did. She set them off into the undulating rows of monoliths of the Holocaust Memorial, thousands of concrete slabs, rising and falling. “If you come to a sidewalk,” she called out, “stop!”

  The boys had no idea what this place was; there was no way she’d explain it.

  Dexter was back at the hotel, wi-fi’d and caffeinated. Another man was suddenly beside her. “You have something for me,” he said in English. She was shocked to recognize him as the tweaked chauffeur who’d shuttled the family from the Frankfurt airport, their first day in Europe. Hayden had been keeping his eye on her, still. Maybe always. Upon reflection, this wasn’t so shocking.

  Kate nodded at the man in recognition, and he returned the nod. She reached into her pocket, handed over the ziplock bag that contained a tube of lip balm and a business card from a tennis club, pilfered from the Macleans’ apartment.

  “Same time tomorrow, north end of Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg.”

  Fifty yards ahead, Ben yelled, “Hi Mommy!”

  She looked down the long row of slate-gray slabs, her little son dwarfed by the immense stone next to him. She waved, hand high in the air. “Okay,” she said, turning back to the man, who’d already vanished.