The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  IT CONTINUED TO feel good, to be on this mission in Berlin. Even if there was a chance that the mission was entirely in her imagination. Maybe this was what had been missing in her life, why she felt so bored, so worthless, so unhappy.

  But what mission did she want? Maybe she didn’t need the type with weapons and secret identities and coded calls and mortal peril. Maybe her family could be her mission. She could approach her children—their education, their diversions—as a job, as a problem to be solved. There was nothing standing in her way of making her life better, a nice normal life, helping with homework, turning her attention to Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and mastering the art of French cooking.

  But first, she still needed to find out who Julia and Bill were.

  Kate stopped walking at the entrance to the playground in Kollwitzplatz. “I’m going to get a coffee,” she said to Dexter. “You want anything?”

  “No thanks.”

  She crossed the street and entered a café and took a seat away from the window. A harried-looking waitress hurried from the kitchen, her tray laden with food for a large, boisterous crowd in the corner. The door opened again, and the man came in. He sat across from Kate.

  She gave him a once-over: a thirty-something in a scruffy beard and cowboy shirt and jeans and sneakers under a peacoat. Indistinguishable from the hipsters who lived in Austin and Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon or Maine. This was globalization: everyone everywhere was interchangeable. You could be anyone anywhere to do anything. This New Wave–loving, pill-popping, Williamsburg-looking van driver was a spy.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said.

  “Yes. I see you brought an entourage.”

  The waitress rushed past without glancing at them.

  “So?” Kate asked.

  “Those people are Craig Malloy and Susan Pognowski.”

  “Pognowski?”

  “Yes, it is a Polish name. She grew up in Buffalo, New York. And the Malloy man is from near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

  The waitress stopped by, holding menus. Kate ordered a coffee to go. The man wanted nothing.

  “They’re married?” Kate asked.

  “Hmm? No. They are not married.”

  “So who are they?”

  “It is interesting,” he said, leaning across the table, smirking.

  At that moment someone delivered the punch line to a joke at the big table, and everyone roared with laughter. A stein was slammed onto the table. A small delivery truck that had been idling outside shifted into first gear and drove away, leaving in its wake an extra clarity to the sounds that remained. A sizzle from the kitchen when the waitress emerged carrying a large bowl of fries. A peal of laughter from the schoolyard around the corner. A shout from her own eldest son, across the street, on a climbing apparatus.

  When the noises died down, the man said, “They are American FBI.”

  Kate was dumbstruck, eyes and mouth wide open, stock-still.

  FBI? She tried to process this information, her mind swirling in different eddies, chasing different ideas. She stared out the window at her children playing, at Dexter seated on a bench, his back to Kate, facing the weak sun hanging in the southern sky.

  “And also interesting?” the man continued. “They are on loan.”

  Kate turned her eyes to him, confused.

  “To a special task force.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “At Interpol.”

  15

  Kate walked to the Wednesday market in the Place Guillaume, flowers and produce, butchers and bakers, fishmongers and a roast-chicken truck. There was a wiry little Frenchman who was a passionate advocate for his alpine cheeses. A Belgian who offered nothing but onions and garlic. There was a fresh-pasta stand, and one for wild mushrooms, and one for olives. There was a surreally talkative woman selling the specialties of Bretagne, and a roly-poly red-faced couple peddling the cured meats of the Tyrol who didn’t speak a word of French, much less English.

  She waited in a shivering queue for roast chickens, lost again in speculation. The good news—if she was inclined to label the silver lining here—was that she wasn’t going crazy. The so-called Macleans really were aliases for feds. But what were they up to? Hayden’s man in Berlin didn’t have any further information, couldn’t get it, not without arousing suspicion, which he point-blank admitted he wasn’t willing to do. She couldn’t argue with him. Well, she could, and she did, but hopelessly.

  Kate shared with many of her CIA brethren a lifelong disdain for the feds who reported into the Hoover Building. The animosity between the spies and the cops was almost entirely irrational, born from the political considerations of the men who’d run both agencies, distrusting one another, playing poorly in the sandbox, vying for the attentions of the succession of dads who’d lived in the mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.

  But whether Kate respected the FBI or not, these agents were in Luxembourg. Why?

  It could have nothing to do with her. They might be pursuing a fugitive: a murderer, a terrorist. This criminal possessed a numbered account in Luxembourg, millions of euros—billions?—that could be withdrawn by him only, in person. So sooner or later, he was going to show up. That’s what Bill and Julia were doing in Europe: waiting to arrest a bad guy.

  They might be investigating a money-laundering operation, drugs or arms, dirty cash being washed in the anonymous machines of Luxembourg’s banks. They were monitoring the couriers who were coming and going past the lax customs station at Lux’s tidy little airport, suitcases filled with dollars that had been carted away from American ghettos to the cartel’s headquarters in South America and then packed into suitcases that were checked into Air France and Lufthansa flights from Rio or Buenos Aires bound for Paris or Frankfurt with connections to Luxembourg. The couriers would be leaving Europe with clean cashier’s checks. So the FBI agents were keeping records; they were building a case.

  Kate ordered her poulet fermier and a petit pot of the potatoes roasted in the fat that dripped off the roasting chickens.

  So why be here in Luxembourg? Why would the FBI loan agents to Interpol and send them to the Grand Duchy?

  There was of course Dexter to consider. What could he have done? Why was he in Luxembourg? He could have embezzled from one of his clients. He could be at this very moment hacking into a corporate database, buying stock on stolen inside information.

  Or.

  Kate tucked her thermal bag of chicken and potatoes into her canvas grocery tote. It had now been a long time since she’d used a plastic bag.

  Or, obviously: Interpol might be after her, at long last. The minute she walked onto Torres’s floor at the Waldorf—no, the minute she’d walked into Union Station in D.C. and paid cash for her Amtrak ticket to New York—she’d had a premonition that one day there would be consequences. And they’d present themselves when she least expected them.

  Kate’s bag was now overflowing with her attempt to purchase normalcy for herself—calla lilies, a baguette, vegetables and fruits and her chicken and potatoes. The load was heavy.

  She would avoid Julia, give herself a cushion of privacy. This was not a long-term solution; in fact, it may turn out to be counterproductive. But it was what she needed now, along with flowers for the dining table, and a mind-clearing immersion in cooking.

  Kate turned from the square into a vehicular street, and the sidewalk was suddenly crammed with nuns. There must’ve been two dozen of them, all old. Kate wondered where they grew the young ones, keeping them hidden from the world, like seedlings in a climate-controlled greenhouse.

  Kate stepped off the curb, giving the sidewalk over to the aged sisters. She walked on the cobblestones, the deep fissures between them filled with minuscule rivulets, a Lilliputian canal system, miniature Holland.

  The nun in the lead looked at Kate through small wire-rimmed glasses. “Merci, madame,” the nun said, softly.

  As Kate walked by the others, each said the same thing, an end
less chorus of gentle Merci, madames, all accompanied by quick glances to Kate’s eyes.

  Then they were gone, out of sight. Kate turned around, looked up the empty street, wondered fleetingly if the nuns had been there at all, or if she’d simply imagined them. The remnants of their piety hung in the air, smothering Kate in guilt.

  KATE WAS SITTING again in the sports-center basement, unable to pay attention to the chitter-chatter humming around her. A phone rang, somewhere down below, from the depths of someone’s bag. No one made a move to answer. Halfway through the second ring, Kate realized that it must be her own disposable mobile. She’d never before heard it ring.

  Kate yanked her bag into her lap. “Excuse me.” Foraging around, standing up, walking out of the café, into the stairwell. “Hello?”

  “Hello.”

  “Give me a minute … I just need to get …” She was at the top of the stairwell, passing the men’s locker room. “Somewhere private.” Into the cold and the wind and the dimness, the grimness of Northern Europe at four-fifteen P.M. in late autumn.

  “So they’re FBI,” she said. To satisfy her curiosity, Kate had again called the Chicago alumni office, then the dean, who reluctantly revealed the old address of William Maclean’s parents, who after another few phone calls Kate found in Vermont, eventually on the phone with Louisa Maclean, who said that twenty years ago—the summer after graduation—her son Bill, driving a rented Vespa on the treacherous coast road in the Cinque Terre, had lost control and crashed into a stone retaining wall. The wall stopped the moped’s forward progress, a crushed heap on the side of the road. But Bill had been flung over the low wall, and plunged two hundred feet to the rocky beach.

  Bill Maclean died in July 1991.

  “Yes,” Hayden answered, “I heard.”

  “I need to find out what they’re doing.”

  “Why? Now that you know they’re not criminals, you don’t need to worry about your, like, valuables. And they’re not going to assassinate anyone over at the palais, and create a huge traffic jam. So what’s it to you?”

  This is when it occurred to her that she was investigating the Macleans in order to avoid investigating her husband. Manufacturing an exterior enemy to demonize, as every politician knows, is far more expedient than confronting the interior one.

  “Because they’re in my life,” she said.

  There was a big ripe silence from the other end of the line, and Kate joined in it, both of them tacitly agreeing to skip over the conversation that neither wanted to have. One that began with Hayden asking, “Do you have something to hide from them?”

  “Okay,” he said. “There’s someone you can talk to, in Geneva. Kyle.”

  Geneva. Hayden started to explain how to make contact, but Kate’s mind was stuck at the previous stage, running through the scenarios that would allow her to hop a flight to Switzerland for a quick meeting.

  This was the type of thing she used to do all the time: pop down to Mexico City or Santiago, claiming she’d gone to a conference in Atlanta. But that had been back when she’d had a grab bag full of excuses; back when it hadn’t been Dexter’s job that was unpredictable and demanding. Back when she’d had freedom to go wherever she needed to go, whenever she needed to go there.

  “I …” She paused, unwilling to say aloud what she’d concluded: it would probably take her weeks to get to Geneva. She was suddenly wistful for the amount of flexibility she’d had in her old existence. It certainly hadn’t seemed so at the time.

  “Yes?” Hayden asked.

  “What about Paris? Or Brussels? Or Bonn?” Places she could get to and back in one day, with the kids; she could tell Dexter it was a mental-health day.

  “The guy for you is in Geneva.”

  “But,” she said, “I can’t get to Geneva.” This was the same type of humiliation she’d felt as a teenager, reluctant to admit to her friends that she couldn’t go out tonight, had to stay home and tend to her dad’s colostomy bag, her mom’s bedsores. The embarrassment that you weren’t independent, your decisions not your own to make. “Not immediately.”

  “Your schedule is your own business.”

  “Isn’t there any way I can do this digitally?”

  “Sure. If you knew the guy, and he trusted you, and you could guarantee a secure connection. But you’ve got none of that. So no.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I have a strange question: is it possible they’re after me?”

  “No.”

  Kate waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “How do you know?”

  “Because if anyone was after you, it’d be us,” Hayden said. “It’d be me.”

  IN THE MORNING she drove Dexter to the airport, where he rented a car for a day-trip drive to Brussels. He returned home just in time for dinner, edgy, distracted, more distant than ever. He could barely pay attention to dinner-table conversation; perhaps he’d gotten so unaccustomed to dining with his family that he’d forgotten how.

  When for the fourth time one of the kids asked “Daddy?” and he didn’t answer, Kate threw down her fork and left the table. She understood that he had to work, and he had to travel. But what he didn’t have to do was be absent even when he was present.

  She steadied herself in the kitchen, trying to calm down. She stared at the doormat, the console table that held the keys, the mail, the mobile phones and bowls filled with coins, the small rug where they all parked their shoes, the little ones and the big ones.

  Dexter’s shoes were muddy. Very muddy—caked on the bottom, spattered up top. It had been raining all day, steadily, but Kate didn’t imagine that the landscape of downtown Brussels included expanses of wet soil through which Dexter would have to trudge on his way to the bank offices.

  She stared at the muddy shoes, trying to avoid suspecting him. She’d promised herself that she would set aside suspicion after she married him.

  But all people have secrets. Part of being human is having secrets, and being curious about other people’s secrets. Dirty fetishes and debilitating fascinations and shameful defeats and ill-begotten triumphs, humiliating selfishness and repulsive inhumanity. The horrible things that people have thought and done, the lowest points in their lives.

  Like marching into a New York hotel and committing cold-blooded murder.

  Kate couldn’t pull her eyes away from Dexter’s shoes. Just because she’d found out the Macleans were dirty didn’t mean her husband was clean.

  Her mind flashed back to three years ago, midwinter, Washington, D.C., cold and blustery. She’d been rushing across I Street to a meeting at the IMF, huddled against the wind, kicking herself for not calling a car. A taxi was disgorging a passenger in the circular driveway of the Army and Navy Club Library, and Kate rushed to grab it, but someone descended from the club entrance and climbed in. Kate stopped in her tracks, swiveling her head around to look for another cab. This cold snap was unexpected.

  Her eyes fell on a bench across the street, on an angled path in Farragut Square. Not the first bench next to the sidewalk, nor the second; this bench was fifty yards into the park. And sitting on it, wearing the unmistakable red plaid hunting cap that she’d mail-ordered from Arkansas, was Dexter. With an unfamiliar man.

  AFTER DEXTER FELL asleep, Kate sat in front of the fire and made a list. A list of the possible reasons for FBI agents on loan to Interpol to be here, in Luxembourg, entwined in the life of an ex-CIA. Kate assigned numerical values to the possibilities’ strength. She couldn’t help but assign the lowest values—ones through fives—to all the explanations that had absolutely nothing to do with herself or Dexter. Then there were some Dexter possibilities that received ones through sevens. Most of them on the harmless side.

  But it was the scenarios that revolved around herself that scored the eights and nines, regardless of Hayden’s assurance that these agents weren’t after her. It was more than possible that this was a mix-up; there had always been dishonesty and cross-purposes between the Bureau and the Agency. Or it could be that
they were protecting her, watching for someone else who’d be coming after her. Or admittedly her departure from the CIA was abrupt, and possibly suspicious, and maybe some other evidence existed to draw attention, and so she was a suspect in a crime of which she was not guilty.

  She carefully placed her list into the glowing embers of the dying fire.

  That cold, windy night back in Washington, the old six-over-six windows rattling in their decaying mullions, Kate had struggled with whether—how—to question Dexter about his visit to Farragut Square. In the end, all she could bring herself to ask was “Do anything special today?” And all she’d received in response was “Nope.”

  She’d put that aside, sealed in an envelope deep inside her, to be opened only if required. She didn’t want to know, unless she absolutely had to, her husband’s secrets.

  16

  “Hi,” Dexter said. “How’s everything?” There was static on the line, as there often was when he was calling from these tax shelters, these criminal havens, these places where he went, probably to help crooks hide their money, or whatever he was doing that required him to lie to his wife.

  Kate sighed, exasperated with the children, angry at her husband. “Fine,” she said, walking away from the kids. “It’s all wonderful.”

  “Really? You sound …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She looked out the window, at the eastern sky sliding from weak daylight to dreary night without any discernible sunset.

  “Everything’s okay? ”

  Everything was not okay, not at all. But what was she going to say, on this open line to Zurich? “Yes,” she answered, staccato, the spit-out syllable signaling that this subject was now closed. “So when are you back?”

  Pause. “Yeah. About that.”

  “Goddammit.”

  “I know, I know. I’m really sorry.”

  “Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, Dexter. Thanksgiving.”