The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

“Of course,” Kate said, her voice dripping with concern and sympathy; Darling was ill. She started walking up the stairs, out of sight and soundless on the plush red carpet. The upstairs hall extended in both directions, dim in one, dark in the other. She took the dark path. The doors were all open, but no lights were on, no slivers of illumination angling into the hall. Kate walked slowly, cautiously, into the first room. A small, nearly empty bedroom. The curtains were closed, the darkness nearly total. She left.

  A door at the far end of the dim hall swung open, bright light spilling out. She saw a leg emerging, stockings and heels; Kate jumped backward into the bedroom.

  “Oh don’t give me that crap,” the woman hissed. “It’s the goddamned Christmas party, Lou. You should be here.” The phone conversation receded down the stairs.

  Back into the hall, to the next room, bigger, an office with a desk and couch and coffee table. A study. Open curtains, light filtering in from the street, through the bare branches of trees, illuminating one wall, the light chopped by a tree, a wood-cut pattern. There was a door against this semi-lit wall, open partway.

  Kate heard breathing.

  She peered through the slightly open closet door, to the floor, where the light fell brightest, and saw pants crumpled at the top of shoes, and above that a stockinged calf held in the air, and above that a quick glimpse of the thick dark between open legs being split, curved and veined and glistening, sliding slowly all the way out before slipping back in, and above that the pushed-up skirt, and above that the blouse yanked askew and a nipple and the arched neck and open mouth and flaring nostrils and tightly clamped eyes, lids jammed together.

  “Ungh,” the woman grunted. The man quickly raised his hand to her mouth and covered it. He let his thumb slide between her lips, and the woman took it between her teeth, enamel glinting.

  Kate was frozen. She couldn’t stop watching, listening. She could even smell it.

  The woman moaned.

  The woman’s eyes were clamped even more tightly shut, head further back. Kate couldn’t pull herself away.

  “Oh. God.” The woman was convulsing, her head lolling in and out of the weak light. Barely enough light to confirm that it was Plain Jane. And the man, of course, was Bill.

  Kate crept away, back toward the door, ever so slowly, quietly, carefully … almost there … one more step—

  “Shit!” Bill spat out.

  Kate turned the door’s corner, into the hall, just in time to hear Plain Jane ask “What?” in a hoarse whisper. And then again, “What?”

  Kate scampered down the dark hall. Down the well-lit stairs, feet sliding on the plush rug, gliding. The guard looked up at her, his mouth open in protest, but he never managed to decide what to say. She breezed past him, into a hall. She would hide in the restroom for a minute. She pushed down on the door’s lever, but it didn’t budge. Locked.

  At the end of the hall, a brass panel was inset into what must be a swinging door. The kitchen. Kate took a step forward, but then the door began to open, and she froze.

  It opened wider, and she heard laughing from a man, giggling from a woman, both sounds—both voices—familiar, very familiar, and then the door was wide open, the man coming out first, followed by the woman.

  Dexter. With Julia.

  “KATE,” JULIA EXCLAIMED, all cheer. It seemed false, like the cover that a woman would lay when pretending that she wasn’t doing something wrong.

  Dexter was flushed.

  Kate felt the need to explain her presence, but it was these two who needed to explain themselves. She stifled herself.

  “Hi,” Dexter said, short and unconvincing, non-incriminating.

  Kate looked from one to the other, her husband to her fictional friend, back again. This wasn’t coming out of nowhere, but it was also not expected. At least, not what she expected out of Dexter.

  They all stood there in the hall, these three, each second an eternity. Julia said nothing more, neither did Dexter. Every millisecond of silence made them seem more and more guilty.

  “What’re you two up to?” Kate finally asked.

  They glanced at each other, Julia and Dexter. Julia giggled again. These two suddenly seemed like brother and sister, or two old friends, not a pair of adulterers.

  “Come,” Dexter said, taking Kate’s hand.

  The kitchen was large and professional, a big work island, multiple ranges, hoods, open cabinets and hanging pots, speed bars, bottles with pour tops, big battered pots.

  Julia headed to a drawer, pulled it open, and removed something. “Here,” she said.

  Kate was confused. She looked down at the offering, then back up at Julia.

  Dexter made his way to the far end of the room, a big steel-doored appliance, refrigerator or freezer. He too was removing something, shutting the door, turning to Kate.

  She looked at her husband’s offering, and her friend’s. Ice cream, and a spoon.

  Kate couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d caught them at something illicit, something hidden. Not the ice cream, nor the obvious thing. Something else.

  TODAY, 12:41 P.M.

  Kate wanders the streets of St-Germain-des-Prés, lost in thought, trying to unravel the meaning of her discovery, an explanation for the incontrovertible evidence in the yearbook. The evidence that Dexter and the woman who now called herself Julia did not meet two years ago, in Luxembourg. They met two decades ago, in college.

  The morning rain has given way to high patchy clouds that rush across the sky, leaving in their wake bursts of harshly bright sunshine, a blustery wind roiling the clumps of fallen leaves.

  She walks through the terrasse of the Flore, where the whole family took a break after the boys’ school interview, and before they rashly chose their apartment, last year. A famous café, its white-and-green china easily recognizable. This is guidebook Paris, Picasso’s Paris. Kate’s home.

  This is not a life she ever expected.

  The past year in Paris was a vast improvement on the prior year in Luxembourg. And this coming year, she knows, will be even better, by degrees. She likes the new friends she and Dexter made last year; she expects she’ll like them even more this year. Plus there will be new people. She has realized that she likes new people.

  She turns into the rue Apollinaire in front of the jaunty stripes of Le Bonaparte.

  Kate likes tennis too. She took up the game a year ago, first in an exhausting flurry of thrice-weekly lessons, to make rapid progress so she could join the round robin of moms from school who play in the Jardins du Luxembourg. By the end of the year, she’d become one of the best players in the group. But she’s neither young nor tall nor fast, and she’s never going to be any of those things, so she’s also never going to be a great player. Just good enough. And she can play with Dexter.

  Now that he doesn’t work so much, and doesn’t need to travel at all, they have ample time—and plenty of money—to do enjoyable things together, constantly. They are permanent tourists, in Paris. Their life is a certain type of dream come true.

  But Kate can’t deny that she still wants something more. Or something else. She’s never going to be one of those women who opens a children’s shoe store or a home-decor boutique, importing stylish plastic from Stockholm and Copenhagen. She isn’t going to immerse herself in studies of the Old Masters or the Existentialists. She’s not going to wander around with a Bristol pad and a box of pastels; nor with a laptop, pecking away at a pointless novel. She can’t imagine leading walking tours for small groups of retirees, progressing from the best bakeries to the best cheese shops, uncovering the covered markets, shaking hands with the falsely friendly proprietors.

  There are a lot of things Kate knows she does not want to do.

  Although hers is by any standard a good life, Kate can’t deny that she’s bored, again. She’s been through this before; she has more self-awareness this time. Which is leading to her conviction that there’s only one solution to that problem. And this afternoon she’s c
onscious that the solution might now be within her grasp, courtesy of the revelation in the yearbook, and how she’ll be able to use this new information.

  It isn’t surprising to Kate that she was lied to by the undercover agent. She was never much aggrieved by that tautology. But her husband’s betrayal is another matter. There has never been any doubt in Kate’s mind that Dexter loves her, and their children. She isn’t concerned about his fundamental nature: he is a good man. Her good man. Whatever the explanation of the enormity of Dexter’s and Julia’s duplicity, it must accommodate the undebatable reality that he’s good, not bad.

  Kate has already thought through a half-dozen scenarios, and dismissed them all. She picks up afresh with Julia’s message, a few hours ago: the Colonel is dead.

  She turns at the chamfered corner of Le Petit Zinc’s elegant door, oozing Art Nouveau out onto the sidewalk, the warm afternoon light setting aglow the sand-colored stones of the buildings in the rue St-Benoit.

  This is an elegant spot, an elegant corner. An elegant turn …

  Kate stops stock-still in the street, eyes frozen in front, mind racing in a circle to come all the way around to the beginning, to the certainty, to confirmation, to the brilliance of it.

  She knows what happened.

  20

  Kate pulled her hat low, shelter against a gust of wind blowing cold down from Mont Blanc looming in the distance, the white-peaked Alps folding over themselves, Alp over Alp, all the way down to Geneva skirting the shores of Lac Léman.

  The ice cream was a plausible explanation. They’d had too much to drink, most of the food in the dining room was gone, they didn’t want any more ham. No one wanted any more ham. Everywhere everyone went, there were ham sandwiches. In bakeries and butchers, supermarkets and cafés. At the kiosks in malls, in the vending machines in offices, under glass domes on the counters at gyms, on airplanes. Goddamned ham sandwiches, everywhere.

  So they’d gone to the kitchen, looking for something nonham to eat. Questionable judgment, wandering through the private spaces of the embassy. A drunken semi-caper. Completely believable.

  Kate walked through Paquis, near the train station, North Africans and Arabs, couscous restaurants and souvenir shops, chunky Turkish prostitutes smoking cigarettes in the doorways of cinder-block buildings, skinny men in baggy jeans lurking in shadows. This would be a good place to buy a gun; this was the type of neighborhood where she’d done that before. Kate was halfway thinking she should have a weapon.

  She crossed the Rhône at the Pont du Mont Blanc, ducked into the Jardin Anglais, wintered over, unpeopled, the wind here frigid and biting, tears springing from her eyes.

  Kate had to keep reminding herself that she hadn’t discovered anything definitively wrong in Dexter’s office. All the material there could be a legitimate part of his job. She didn’t understand his job, and never had. She had no idea what it entailed.

  But Jesus, that video camera. How was she going to explain to him why she’d broken into his office? And how?

  Luckily—or not; who knew?—it didn’t appear that Dexter had been alerted yet to her break-in. Or if he had, then he was certainly not the man she thought she’d married.

  Kate passed a familiar-looking woman on the sidewalk, tall and dark-haired and heavy-eyelashed. Kate couldn’t place her, then she did: a flight attendant on this morning’s hop. The LuxAir stewardesses in their sprightly blue scarves practically threw the ham sandwiches at passengers as soon as the plane was airborne, eager to get the snack under way on the short flight. They were all short flights, on LuxAir.

  Kate headed up the hill on the rue Verdaine, the architecture now looming chunks of medieval stone, tight cobblestoned streets, a promenade along a park, fortifications, arches, terraced sidewalks. This part of Geneva reminded her of Luxembourg, of Arlon, of everywhere.

  Snowflakes began to flutter, drifting softly to the street lined with eighteenth-century hôtels particuliers, massive arched doors leading to courtyards, a matching suite of three imposing buildings leaning against one another, like fashion models posing for a homoerotic shot, skin-on-skin-on-skin.

  It was certainly possible that Dexter and Julia were having an affair. They could be meeting at Julia’s apartment, weekday mornings, while Bill was in his strange office lifting weights or masterfully fucking Jane—possibly both, at the same time—and Kate was at some coffee morning, sitting around with a bunch of women bitching about the absence of their husbands, while her own was around the corner, in bed with her best friend.

  Or had they simply dipped into the kitchen, buzzed, and kissed for five minutes?

  Or was it a harmless flirtation, a diversion, staying alive, un-old, un-dead?

  On the rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, nearly all the antiques shops were closed, neatly handwritten signs announcing the vacation, fermé until early January. No presents to be purchased. Unimaginable, in the States, that any store would be closed two days before Christmas.

  If it were really an affair? What would Kate do? Could she understand this, ignore this, forgive this? Did Dexter still love her? Was he bored, or curious, or horny, or selfish, or terrified of mortality? Was he having a midlife crisis? Had he done this before? Was he an inveterate philanderer? Had he been cheating all these years? Was it turning out that he was an utter bastard, and she hadn’t been aware of it? For nearly a decade?

  Or was his infidelity a crime of opportunity? Had he been seduced, unfairly? Plied with liquor and teased and eventually propositioned, an offer he couldn’t refuse?

  At the apex of the hill, the street opened out onto the Place du Bourg-de-Four, cafés and a fountain in the middle of a wide, irregularly shaped expanse of cobblestones. Kate checked her watch—2:58—and took a seat on a caned chair, next to a propane-powered heater throwing warmth into the air, spitting into the ocean. She ordered a café au lait from a handsome, self-satisfied waiter.

  Or was it something more sinister than sex?

  Across the terrasse a mother and daughter in matching fur hats smoked matching cigarettes, long skinny tobacco toothpicks. The mother caressed a miniature dog in her lap, some type of white fluffiness. The daughter said something, but Kate couldn’t hear; they were too far away. Good.

  Her coffee arrived with a foil-wrapped cookie in the saucer, as always, everywhere.

  The waiter continued on to the mother and daughter. They laughed at something he said as he leaned on the back of a chair, flexing, flirting. Kate heard footsteps behind her, a man’s hard soles falling on stones. She didn’t turn. The man took a seat at the next table, separated from Kate by the heater and its glowing cap, a flying saucer.

  The waiter returned. The man ordered hot chocolate. He opened his newspaper, carefully folding Le Monde into a prim packet. He wore a gray overcoat, red scarf, skinny jeans, pointy black shoes with green laces. His skin scrubbed and shiny, face shaved extremely closely, more hairless than Dexter was ever able to shave. The same look as the boys in Dupont Circle, something about their entire faces that broadcast their orientation.

  Kate put her tote on the table. She removed a guidebook to Switzerland, and a messily folded map of Geneva, and a pen and small notepad.

  The waiter delivered the man’s hot chocolate.

  She took the camera out of her pocket, held it aloft, and leaned toward this man. “Excusez-moi,” she said. “Parlez-vous anglais?”

  “Yes, I speak English.”

  “Would you mind taking a picture of me?”

  “Not at all.” He scooted his chair over, and took her camera.

  Kate looked around for the right backdrop—a fountain, attractive buildings, snow in the grass. She moved her chair a few degrees. She pushed aside the guidebook, out of the frame of the upcoming picture. There was a photo shoved between the pages of her guidebook.

  “Are you visiting Geneva on your way to a ski trip?”

  “Yes. We leave tomorrow. To Avoriaz, for a week.”

  The man directed her to move to the ri
ght, and snapped again. The waiter reemerged, asked Kate and the man if everything was okay, then returned to the mother and daughter. He was probably the reason the women were here.

  The man rose into a crouch. He leaned forward, extending the camera, and put it on Kate’s guidebook. As his hand retreated, he pulled the photo out of the pages, slipped it into his coat pocket. Then he picked up his cup, and took a long drink of chocolate.

  “Three days,” he said. “Maybe four.” He placed a giant coin onto the table; some of these Swiss franc pieces were practically sporting goods. Why did they need a different currency? Goddamned Swiss.

  “Then I will find you.”

  IT STARTED SNOWING when they were halfway up the mountain, the snow noticeably heavier as the car climbed, traffic slowing, the shoulder littered with pulled-over station wagons whose drivers were kneeling in the gravelly slush, installing chains. Switchbacks one after another, straightaways of barely a few hundred yards, the downhill side of the road falling away steeply past jagged outcroppings and tenacious pines and precariously perched timber-framed chalets.

  By Monday morning three fresh feet had fallen and the clouds had fled in the night, dawn breaking pink-gray out the bedroom window that faced the center of the resort, the Village des Enfants and the cafés and shops. When Kate padded into the living room, she gasped at the view, which had remained completely cloaked in cloud and mist and swirling snow for their first thirty-six hours on this mountain, but now was crystal clear, picture-perfect Alps, Alp after Alp after Alp, all cloaked in white, spray-painted snow.

  JULIA SKIED OVER from the edge of the trail, gliding effortlessly. “My God,” she said. “How great is this?” She kissed Kate on the cheek. Bill also skated over, shook hands with Dexter, slapped him on the upper arm.

  The snow was blindingly white, the visibility seemingly infinite in every direction, as if the entire world had been placed under a microscope, the lens freshly wiped. The view to the north encompassed four folds of mountain range, then a sliver of the lake, then the mountains on the far side, tiny notches under an immensity of clear sky.