The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  “Shall we?” Bill asked, pushing off with his poles.

  “Let’s roll!” said Dexter, more enthusiastic than before. Gung-ho, now. He’d been unconfident, terrified, in the difficult skiing of the heavy storm, the summit lift depositing skiers into a total whiteout nine thousand feet up, above the tree line, no forests to mitigate the elements, nowhere to hide, no way to see the boundaries of the pistes, visibility at thirty yards, one second away from the farthest you could see. After a single trip to the top, Dexter had refused to ski the summits, and instead retreated down the mountain, to the quiet trails that snaked among the trees.

  “I want to see where the hell I’m going,” he’d said. Cruising down that easy trail, Kate had lost herself in his unintentional bit of philosophy. She too wanted to see where the hell she was going. Wondered whether that was ever again going to be possible.

  Now they were back at the summit, a completely different experience in this blazing sunshine. Kate pulled her goggles off the top of her helmet, fitted them around her eyes, the soft foam pressing gently into her cheekbones, her forehead, sealing her eyes inside this pink-tinged cocoon. La vie en rose. A flash in her mind of the blood in the carpet radiating from Torres’s head, his lifeless unstaring eyes, the sound of the baby crying.

  Kate shuddered the thought away. She skied to the lip of the piste, a quick drop-off onto a wind-whipped face, swirls of snow slithering across the surface.

  “I’ll go first,” Bill said, and launched himself over the ledge. Dexter looked none too sanguine about this trail, but he dutifully followed. Then Julia.

  Kate remained at the top, looking down on these three people, all waiting for her to throw herself off a cliff.

  KATE PAUSED AT a wide turn on a broad trail. It had been three days since her meeting with Kyle in Geneva, and it was time for him to come skiing out of nowhere, pull to a stop, and tell her … tell her what?

  Tell her that these FBI agents were investigating something that had nothing to do with Kate or Dexter. This was what Kate wanted most in the world, now: that improbable news.

  Kate waited a few more seconds, a half-minute, staring at the fluffy white landscape, the marshmallow fields. No one arrived.

  She gave up, set off down the hill, her turns silent in the soft powder, the poles at the sides of the trail counting down to the bottom, where a half-dozen trails converged at three lifts and a handful of cafés, hundreds of canvas chairs arrayed in the sunshine, people lying around with jackets off, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, eleven in the morning. Dexter and Julia were at one of these cafés, boots unbuckled, resting.

  Kate joined Bill. They skated through the milling crowd, pushed through the gates, planted their poles. They turned to face the oncoming chair clanging around the bend, the steel bar at the front of the seat attacking the crooks of their knees, slamming into them, forcing them to sit quicker and harder than expected, butts stinging.

  No one else joined them on the lift. It sped away, at first along a level area, then up a steep angle to cross an exposed rock face lined with a spiderweb of dark mineral veins. A varicose rock.

  “It’s exhilarating, isn’t it?” Bill asked.

  The lift leveled out to cross a shallow valley, a dale cut into the side of the mountain, a rushing brook surrounded by pines half-buried in snow, high steep banks and frigid-looking water, stones in the bed, thousands upon thousands of stones, pink and gray, white and black, brown and tan, large and small and medium.

  “When you’re speeding down, not sure what you’re going to encounter next.”

  The chair passed the dale and climbed another rocky face, then a long rough slope, icicles and snowdrifts, immense boulders strewn, balls tossed around by giants. They were now very high from the ground, one of those spots in a two-thousand-foot ascent when the lift is more than the normal twenty feet up, but rather fifty, sixty feet.

  The chair slowed. Then stopped.

  Exposed to the wind, the cold. Swinging back, an equal and opposite reaction to what had been their forward momentum. Newton’s Third Law, here above the mountain. Swinging forward, then back. Forward, back.

  Creaking.

  A shudder ran down Kate’s spine. This was a mistake. She shouldn’t be here, alone with Bill.

  The wind picked up, howling, pushing the swing of the chair into a bigger arc, the hinge’s creak louder. The extra-harsh coldness of a stalled lift on a windy day; raw exposure.

  Kate looked up, to where the chair was connected to the cable by a clasp that looked like the end of a shoelace.

  “Sorta scary, isn’t it?”

  It was called an aglet, the shoelace tip.

  Bill leaned forward, looked down. “If you fell from here, do you think you’d die?”

  The aglet-like fixture was clamped to the cable as if with giant pliers. Kate could see the seam where it could be opened.

  “What do you think?”

  Kate looked at him. She could see through her rose lenses something new in his face, an expression she hadn’t seen before. Something hard.

  “You ever been afraid for your life, Kate?”

  EDUARDO TORRES HAD been living in a suite at the Waldorf, the hotel where presidents stay when they stop in New York for photo ops at the United Nations and a Broadway theater, a game at Yankee Stadium. Torres, however, wasn’t staying in the presidential suite. He wasn’t a president, never had been. But he thought he should be. And not just president of Mexico. Torres had a grandiose vision for a pan–Latin American supra-state—el Consejo de las Naciones, the Council of Nations—of which he would be leader, in effect the head of the western hemisphere and the half-billion people who lived south of the U.S. border.

  But first he had to mount a triumphant return from unofficial exile. When he’d lost the election, he’d not conceded graciously; instead he’d objected vociferously. He’d incited violence, which in turn instigated revenge violence, and led to a generally unsafe environment for the ex-general. So he’d fled his Polanco compound to Manhattan, where he didn’t need to employ an entire regiment merely to make a restaurant secure for dinner. In America he could feel safe with a handful of bodyguards.

  Torres had spent the previous year trying to build alliances and raise money for the next election, or a coup, or who knew what path he imagined for his ascendancy; he was delusional. No rational players were willing to offer him any support of any sort.

  He was getting desperate. His desperation was making him increasingly unviable, which in turn was making him increasingly desperate. A vicious cycle.

  Kate, meanwhile, had just taken a trip to southern Mexico, which would turn out to have been her final overseas mission. She’d held a series of not particularly clandestine meetings with local politicians, trying to befriend—or at least un-alienate—whoever would be next, the generals and entrepreneurs and mayors who would mount their own presidential campaigns, sooner or later. Kate sat in courtyard gardens, purple bougainvillea climbing whitewashed walls, sipping cups of strong coffee in colorful ceramics delivered on hand-forged silver trays, absorbing their bombast.

  Then she returned to Washington, to her husband and six-month-old firstborn. She was walking on G Street, returning to the office from lunch, when a town car pulled to the curb. The driver lowered his window.

  “Señor Torres would appreciate a few minutes of your time.”

  Kate quickly weighed her options, her responses. No matter how irrational Torres was becoming, there was no way he would do harm to a CIA officer in Washington.

  “He is at the Ritz. He is available now.”

  Kate climbed into the backseat, and five minutes later walked into the hotel lobby, where a bodyguard met her and directed her to Torres’s suite.

  “Absolutely not,” she said. “He can meet me in the bar.”

  Señor joined her in the lounge and ordered a bottle of water and asked about her well-being, a grace period that lasted thirty seconds before he began to pontificate. She listened for a
half-hour to his tale of woe, to his vision for Mexico, and Latin America. He made an impassioned yet wholly ludicrous case for why the CIA should support him.

  As an audience, Kate strove to seem dubious and pessimistic but fundamentally noncommittal and decidedly nonconfrontational. She’d known Torres for a decade. She didn’t want to piss him off unless she had to.

  Torres asked the waiter for the bill. He told Kate he’d be returning to New York in the morning, and looked forward to their next conversation at her earliest convenience. She said she’d discuss it with her superiors.

  He nodded slowly, closing his eyes, as if expressing deep gratitude. But he didn’t say thank you.

  Kate rose.

  That’s when Torres reached into his jacket and removed something from his breast pocket. He laid it on the gleaming cherry table, but said nothing.

  She glanced down. It was a three-by-five print, glossy paper. She leaned over to get a closer look at the sharp, clear image, obviously taken with a powerful telephoto lens.

  Kate straightened her back, deliberately slowly, trying to stay calm. Her eyes flickered up from the photo to the man across the table.

  Torres was staring into the distance, as if this implicit threat had nothing to do with him. As if he were merely a messenger, and this were an ugly business between Kate and someone else.

  21

  Bill slid in front of Kate, down a steep, ungroomed trail, thick woods on one side, the other a rocky cliff lined with trail-limit poles—black-tipped poles, expert-slope poles, well beyond Kate’s abilities. He seemed determined to take her to the next level, or she was going to refuse to be taken there, or she was going to try and fail. But in any case, it would be different.

  Kate struggled down the mogul-infested slope. A pair of fearless teenagers zoomed past and were gone within seconds. Kate and Bill were alone again in the deep silence of a tall snowbound mountain on the French-Swiss border.

  She traversed the bumpy field to where the mountain came to an abrupt end at the intersection with the sky. As she neared the cliff’s edge, she could see more of the view out beyond the mountain, but she couldn’t see any of the side itself; the drop-off was too steep. A fantastically terrifying sign was planted here, a pictogram of a skier falling, windmilling, one ski off, a pole in the air. Certain death, is what this sign promised.

  Bill was tight behind her. “You’re doing great,” he said.

  Kate wasn’t reassured. She decided to stop but then didn’t, kept going, and decided to stop again but again didn’t, went faster, and faster, getting more nervous, and she could hear Bill’s turns behind her, and she could see the fall-away off to her left, thirty feet down to an outcrop of boulders, another twenty to the bottom of the ravine, and her left ski slipped out, toward the edge, nearing air …

  She turned sharply toward safety, digging into the snow with her edges, pushing hard with her downhill ski, quickly coming to a snow-throwing stop—

  Realizing, too late, that she was stopping with too little warning. She was still in the microsecond process of this realization when she heard yelling—

  Felt his pole trying to knock her out of the way—

  His ski tip rushing across hers—

  The full collision, the impact on her hip and torso and shoulder and arm, then she was airborne, being propelled toward the edge of the trail, the ledge of the slope, falling down the piste and sideways, in the direction of a long, fatal drop, the poles no longer in her palms but still attached by nylon straps to her wrists, spinning batons, only one ski still secured to her boot, and she tried to remember if she’d ever heard any advice—anywhere: in Girl Scouts, or at training on the Farm, or even on ESPN or who knows maybe PBS—about what is the best position to be in when you fall fifty feet off a cliff onto a rock?

  KATE TRIED TO lift her head, but couldn’t. She couldn’t move her neck, her shoulders, her arms. She couldn’t see anything except a faint tinge of rose to the near-total blackness. Her face was pressed into the dense granular snow. The cold had suffused her skin, and she imagined her face muscles chilling, being flash-frozen, like sockeye salmon on a North Pacific trawler, their eyes permanently immobilized while looking off to the side.

  It felt like a tremendous weight had pinned her at the spine, paralyzing her.

  She tried to wiggle her toes, but couldn’t tell if she succeeded; goddamn ski boots.

  She began to hyperventilate.

  And then the weight on her spine might have shifted. And then it definitely did shift, at first increasing in pressure, then decreasing, then disappearing completely.

  Kate heard something.

  She thought she could move now. She did, turning, rolling her torso and shoulder and neck, turning her face from the snow, her goggles still mostly covered but not completely, so she could make out the world again with her eyes, and that thing she’d heard before, she heard it again, and it was a voice, and she could see through the patches of snow that it was Bill, and he was standing above her, asking if she was okay.

  And she was.

  DARKNESS ADVANCED QUICKLY in the mountains. By three, the sun’s angle had become oblique, the blue-tinged light flat, shadowless.

  Kate arrived by herself to the bottom of an easy cruiser trail, a respite from Bill’s aggression. She hustled to the gates of the high-speed quad while there was no one waiting, intending to get on alone. But another skier pulled up to her side.

  It was a man; it was Kyle. Finally.

  The gates opened, and the two of them pushed up to the red line painted on the rubber matting, turned to face the oncoming chair. Then another skier arrived to Kate’s other side, invading their privacy. Damn.

  The three sat down with a group thud. Kyle closed the safety bar. “Bonjour,” he said, barely audible through the grating of the chair pulling out.

  Kate lifted her goggles off her face. She looked over at this Kyle character from Geneva, then stole a glance to her other side, at the third skier. She did a double take as she realized it was Dexter, grinning at her.

  “Sweetheart,” she said. “You snuck up on me.” Loud enough to ensure that Kyle heard, unmistakably.

  “Yes I did,” Dexter said, exultant in his sportiness. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Wondering if Dexter had heard Kyle’s hello.

  Dexter was leaning forward, looking over Kate, at Kyle. Double-damn. “You two know each other?”

  Please, Kate thought—prayed—let Kyle not be an idiot.

  “No,” Kyle answered.

  “You said hello.”

  “Just being friendly.”

  Kate stared ahead while these two men talked across her, zipping through the sky.

  “I’m Dexter Moore. My wife, Kate.”

  “I’m Kyle. Pleased to meet you.”

  “You staying here?” Dexter asked. “Or visiting from another resort?”

  “Day-tripping, actually. Up from Geneva. I live there.”

  The chair rumbled through a support tower.

  “We’re skiing with some other Americans today,” Dexter said. “Friends from Luxembourg. That’s where we live.”

  Kyle couldn’t figure out how to continue this conversation; nor how to stop it. Kate didn’t know what the hell to do about this. So she just sat silently, while the men made small talk.

  BILL TOOK OFF his Muppet mitten, and Kyle did the same, and the two shook hands, introductions all around.

  “We found this lonely American on the mountain,” Dexter explained. They were standing on a wind-blown ridge, with a sharp drop-off onto a steep mogul field to one side, an unskiable cliff to the other, cordoned off with a slack yellow rope that would do nothing to slow people down, much less stop them, on their way off the edge.

  Bill gave Kyle a once-over. “You don’t say.”

  Kyle smiled, big white teeth gleaming out of winter ruddiness.

  Dexter checked his watch. “We have to go. Ski-school pickup is in a few minutes.”
He turned to Kyle. “Want to join us for après-ski?”

  Kyle hesitated, but not too long. Not long enough for anyone to think it was anything other than a man considering an unexpected social invitation. “Sure,” he said. “Love to.”

  The light was failing, the sun out of view, over a jagged summit to the southwest. The five Americans traversed the ridge in a snaking line, their ski edges scraping loudly against hard-packed crud, interspersed with soft whooshes through the softer snow, the rustle of nylon rubbing nylon, a clank as a pole hit a boot. Kate heard Bill close behind, and couldn’t stop the shiver running down her spine.

  No one said anything.

  Around a bend and the centre de la station came into view, the cluster of tall buildings surrounding the Village des Enfants, the horse-drawn carriages moving with surprising speed, all of it cloaked in fresh snow, dotted with sharp pinpoints of electric lights, a complicated foreground against a simple backdrop of canyon and valley and more mountains and the immense broadness of the cerulean sky.

  “Who’s Kyle?” Bill asked.

  Kate shrugged dismissively. “Guy from a chairlift.”

  “Yeah,” Bill snorted. “Like I’m a guy from a tennis club.”

  Kate’s brain went haywire. She didn’t understand what Bill was saying. Her mouth was open, then she closed it, then opened it again, but she couldn’t think of anything to say without giving something away. But saying nothing would also be giving something away. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  A gust of wind blew the loose snow into the air. The sky seemed to be dimming by the second.

  “Are you going to tell me? ”

  Bill stared at her for a second, two, but then skied away without saying anything.

  There was only one explanation: he knew. He knew that she knew.

  Kate pushed off, following Bill down the hill and around a bend and across a plateau and into the thick humanity swarming around the center of the resort, parents pouring into the children’s area, big hugs and high fives and toddlers crying from the relief of finally seeing Mommy after a seemingly interminable and possibly terrifying day.