The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  A taxi was parked at one end of the block, the driver blowing cigarette smoke out the half-open window, billowing up in violent-looking bursts, the dense warm smoke cohering in the cold night air.

  In the other direction, Kate could barely see the outline of a figure under an oak planted in a clearing, the soil covered with a black iron grate. He’d probably be there till dawn—or maybe they’d take turns on this overnight sentry duty—making sure the Moores didn’t flee. Standing uncomfortably on the cobblestones, leaning against a sharp-edged iron rail, bundled and shivering, feet aching, tired and hungry and cold and bored.

  But this was his job. And although Kate didn’t know it at the time, he’d recently made a discovery that had amplified his motivation, which was now at a level that could be fairly characterized as obsession. So he had passion, to help him through the long dark night.

  KATE WAS AGAIN sitting on the balcony when Dexter returned. He dropped his keys in the bowl on the hall table, where he always dropped his keys. He walked across the polished stone tiles, the same tiles as on every other floor in Luxembourg, through the half-light. He stepped out onto the balcony, and shut the door behind him.

  The rain and clouds had blown by. The night was now clear, stars twinkling.

  “You can have me,” Kate said, “or you can have the money.” She’d made her decision, and it was nonnegotiable. She was convinced that she knew Dexter’s essential character. Which was not a man who wanted to buy yachts and sports cars with a fortune’s worth of stolen blood money. He’d wanted, simply, to steal it. “But you can’t have both.”

  They faced each other across the cold darkness, for the second night in a row, a tremendous distance traveled in the intervening hours.

  Dexter let his head fall back, stared at the sky. “Do you really need to ask?”

  “I wish not. But I do.”

  He understood: the ground had shifted beneath their feet. It was now impossible to know exactly where she stood.

  “You,” he said, looking at her. “Obviously, I choose you.”

  She returned his gaze. Something passed between them that she couldn’t put a name to, an acknowledgment, a resignation, a gratefulness, a hodgepodge of emotion between two people who’ve been married a long time. He reached his hand out, took hers.

  “We leave that twenty-five million in that account,” she said, “and never touch it.”

  “Then why keep it? Why not give it away? Build a school in Vietnam. An AIDS clinic in Africa. Whatever.”

  It had never occurred to Kate that she’d be able to dispose of a huge sum of money. That she’d be able to donate anything to anyone. She reconsidered her plan, her options, in this odd new light. They were silent for a few moments, lost in thought.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “We’ll need to keep a cushion. A large stash of getaway cash. Enough to build a whole new life, from scratch, instantaneously.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not convinced there’s no way for you to get caught. There’s always a way to get caught. There might be evidence you don’t know about. There’s the girl in London; there’s your Croatian source, wherever—whoever—he is. There’s whoever those people spoke to, whoever they slept with. There are those FBI agents and their records. There’s Interpol.”

  Dexter slumped low in the chair. It was one o’clock in the morning.

  “We’ll need to be on the alert, for years,” Kate continued. “Maybe forever. We’ll need to be ready to disappear with a suitcase full of cash.”

  “Okay. But that’s, what? A million? What about the rest of it?”

  “We need to leave it alone. Sort of like escrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because someday, we might need to give it back.”

  KATE WOKE WITH a start, in a sweat.

  She padded down the dark hall, kissed the boys on the tops of their perfect heads, listened to them breathing, safe and sound.

  She looked out the window. Bill was still out there, making sure she wasn’t fleeing.

  Dexter was fast asleep, the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders.

  But Kate was wide awake, chased by the same demon that haunted her regularly, especially when she was trying to forget it.

  THE DESCENT WAS steep and narrow, a sharp ninety-degree turn in the middle of it, another difficult turn on the other side of the garage door onto the narrow stone-walled street, also steeply descending, more sharp turns. Kate guided the car carefully through the narrow streets, up and down the rain-slicked cobblestones, around tight corners. The radio was tuned to France Culture, the morning news, political scandal. She still didn’t understand a quarter of the words, but she was semi-satisfied that she was getting the story. In the backseat the boys were discussing what types of things they most enjoyed cutting or chopping. Jake liked apples; Ben claimed, surprisingly, kiwi.

  Kate had achieved that special level of fatigue that was almost hallucinatory. A feeling she remembered from her children’s infancy, awake for the four A.M. feeding. And from the missions she’d run, awake for the three A.M. break-ins, the five A.M. unscheduled flights from improvised airstrips in jungle clearings.

  She led the children through the morning mist across the campus, exchanging hellos and smiles and nods with a dozen friends and acquaintances. She had a quick chat with Claire. She was introduced by Amber to a newly arrived American, a freckle-faced young woman from Seattle with a husband at Amazon, in the converted old brewery down in Grund. Kate agreed to join them for coffee before pickup, six and a half hours from now, the daily window of opportunity to shop and clean and see movies and have affairs with tennis coaches. To live whatever type of secret life you could conjure. Or merely to have unsecret coffee with other expat housewives.

  Down the hill, extra-carefully through a dangerous construction zone, across the railroad’s grade crossing, up again, then down to cross the river Alzette in Clausen, then ascending to the Haute Ville, past the turnoff to the grand duke’s palais, past the fat arrogant guard with the tinted glasses, back to her spot in the parking garage. Chirp-chirp.

  It had started to rain again. Kate set off on foot through Centre, streets she knew by heart, every dip and turn, every storefront and shopkeeper.

  An old nun stood in front of St-Michel. “Bonjour,” she said to Kate.

  “Bonjour.” Kate looked at the nun closely, rimless glasses and close habit under a dark felt coat. Kate now saw that she wasn’t old, this nun; she just looked it from afar. She probably wasn’t any older than Kate.

  Onto the montée du Clausen, dramatic vistas on either side of the narrow sloping plateau, wide-open views of browns and grays, wet dun. The rain picked up, a cold steady downpour now. Kate pulled her coat tightly around herself.

  A train traversed the gorge on the high aqueduct-style bridge. On the semi-frozen river below, a duck quacked insistently, sounding like a grumpy old man arguing with a cashier. A trio of Japanese tourists wearing plastic ponchos scurried across the street.

  Kate climbed to the observation deck atop the fortifications, which were cut through with a maze of tunnels. Hundreds of miles of tunnels ran beneath the city, some of them large enough for horses, furniture, suited-up regiments. During wars the town’s populace would hide—would live—in these tunnels, shielding themselves from the carnage above.

  Kate took the final step onto the platform. There was another woman up here, facing away, northeast toward the gleaming EU towers in Kirchberg. Standing atop old Europe, gazing at new.

  “You’re wrong,” Kate said.

  The woman—Julia—turned to face her.

  “And you need to leave us alone.”

  Julia shook her head. “You found the money, didn’t you?”

  “Goddammit, Julia.” Kate was struggling to keep herself composed. She wasn’t terribly confident she was going to succeed. “It’s simply not true.”

  Julia squinted into a burst of sideways-blowing rain. “You’re lying.”
r />   In her entire career, Kate had never lost her temper during a mission, during a confrontation. But when the children were babies they’d sapped her spirit, defeated her patience, and she’d lost her temper regularly. It had become a familiar sensation, the tightness in her chest that preceded a loss of control.

  “And I’m going to prove it,” Julia said, taking another step toward Kate, wearing an insufferably smug smile on her preposterously painted lips.

  Kate shot her arm up and hand out and slapped Julia across the face, snapping her wrist as she made contact with the wet skin, a hard stinging open-hand slap that left a big red mark.

  Julia pressed her hand to her injured face, looked Kate in the eye, a look that seemed like satisfaction. She smiled.

  Then she lunged, reaching for Kate’s shoulders, her throat, pushing into her, driving with her legs. Kate staggered back, toward the stairs; she was going to fall down the stairs if she didn’t regain her balance. Kate spun away, coming to a stop against the low stone wall that separated her from a seventy-foot drop.

  Kate glanced around, looking at the dangerous cliff that surrounded her on three sides; Julia was standing at the top of the stairs on the fourth side, cutting off the escape route. The Japanese witnesses had disappeared. There were no other tourists, no other sightseers, midweek in a small northern European city in the middle of the winter, in the frigid pouring rain.

  They were all alone.

  Julia took a step toward Kate, face lowered, jaw tensed, glowering. Another step. Kate was pinned against the wall.

  Julia was now just a few feet away. Kate suddenly cocked her arm and threw a quick punch. Julia ducked and spun and brought her hand out of her pocket, a shiny silver something rising.

  Kate lashed out with a kick, her right foot knocking into Julia’s hand and the weapon, but the two things didn’t separate, while Kate lost her balance on the slick wet stones. She fell, first her ass and then the back of her head making painful jarring contact with the hard, dense, uneven sandstone.

  Everything went black.

  But for only a split second. Then Kate’s vision returned in dots and stars and swirls of multicolored light, and she felt herself reaching into her pocket, and then her eyes could make out Julia regaining her balance, spinning back toward Kate, whose own arm was rushing up, a blur and the swish of fabric against fabric.

  Julia was standing over Kate, aiming her gun at Kate’s head. And Kate’s matte black Beretta was aimed directly at Julia’s chest.

  A BUS RUMBLED by on the street below, hidden from view, shifting gears to make the final push to the top of the steep Clausen hill.

  The women stared at each other across the sights of their handguns. They were both soaking wet, water streaming through their hair, across their faces, in their eyes. Kate blinked the water away. Julia wiped her brow with her free left hand.

  They continued to stare.

  Then without warning Julia lowered her gun. She stared at Kate for a second, then nodded. It was the tiniest of nods, her neck slightly inclining, the angle of her face barely changing. Or maybe her neck and head didn’t move at all; maybe the nod was just in the eyes, a blink. Her cheeks tightened, in what may have been a smile, or a grimace.

  Kate would revisit this enigmatic look many times over the next year and a half. Julia was trying to communicate something to her, there in the pouring rain on the observation deck. But Kate couldn’t figure out what it was.

  Then Julia turned, and walked across the platform, down the stairs, and out of sight. Gone. For, Kate believed, ever.

  “DID YOU HEAR about the Macleans?”

  Kate was standing at school, waiting for three o’clock. It was cold but cloudless and bright, the type of day that seemed commonplace back in the American Northeast, high-winter, but that seemed a rare pleasure here, a break from the everyday grayness, la grisaille.

  The question came from ten feet away, off behind Kate. She didn’t want to turn to face this conversation, but she did want to eavesdrop.

  “What about them?”

  “They’re leaving. May have already left.”

  “Back to America?” This woman’s voice sounded familiar. “Why?”

  The giant door opened, and children began to emerge from the building, dazed by the glaring sunshine.

  “I don’t know. All I heard was that they’re leaving. From Samantha. You know she works at Luxembourg Relocation Experts? She just received a listing for the Macleans’ apartment. Checked with the broker, and found out that they’re being released from their lease because they’re returning to America, for work. Immediately.”

  Jake walked into the sunshine, looking around for his mother, finding her, his face lighting up, as it always did, every day. “Hi Mommy.”

  Kate turned and glanced at the gossiping women. One was a vaguely familiar face with vague bits of information. Kate felt this woman’s eyes upon her, a known confederate of Julia Maclean, possibly tainted by whatever had forced the departed into their flight.

  The other woman, the one with the familiar voice, was Plain Jane. She met Kate’s eye, then looked down, in unmistakable shame. She probably thought this was about herself; her affair with Bill had ruined his marriage. We all see ourselves as the center of everything.

  THE WINTER EBBED away. They spent a week in Barcelona, warmer than the north of the continent, jacket weather instead of coats. A weekend drive to Hamburg. A weekend flight to Vienna. Foreign places, in foreign tongues.

  Kate spent a solo weekend in wintry Paris, down on the Friday-morning TGV, a comfortable two-hour ride, then an invigorating walk from Gare de l’Est to lunch in a covered market, oilskin-covered tables and steam billowing from the Vietnamese stall, batter sizzling on the wide crepe pans, plates of architectural pigs’ feet. Popped in and out of the grand department stores on the Grands Boulevards. Visited the Louvre.

  On Saturday, late afternoon, she stood on the Pont Neuf, the river glinting smooth and silvery in the winter light. She retied her new scarf around her neck, tighter, warmer. She crossed back to the busy buzzing of the Left Bank, the cafés and brasseries packed for early-evening drinks and cigarettes, sunlight slipping away and replaced with electric. Waiting for a traffic light to change on a corner of the Place St-Michel, packed with hundreds of people, Kate noticed that the tree branch hanging over the intersection was beginning to bud.

  WHEN THEY LEFT Luxembourg for the summer holiday in the South of France, they thought they’d be returning in five weeks. Assumed they’d be sending the kids back to the same school, in new grades. But in that month on the Mediterranean they reexamined their plan. Did they really want to live in Luxembourg? Did they need to?

  What they needed—what they had needed—was for Dexter to be able to open the ultra-protected numbered accounts that his scheme required. He’d needed to incorporate a société anonyme that would operate in a business to which no authority would give a second thought: financial-markets investing, in Luxembourg. They needed to pay income taxes somewhere that wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the FBI.

  Did it need to be Luxembourg? No. It could’ve been Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands, or Gibraltar, or any number of tidy little privacy-friendly nation-states. Dexter had visited them all, back in the year before they’d moved. He’d chosen Lux because it seemed like the nicest tax haven in which to live. It was a real place, not a remote island in the Irish Sea nor a country club in the Caribbean nor a rocky outcrop of the Pyrenees. It had a thriving expat community, good schools, easy access to the cultural riches of Western Europe.

  And no one in America knew what Luxembourg was. When Americans heard you were moving to Zurich or Grand Cayman, they assumed you were hiding money, or on the run, or both. No one knew what you were doing in Luxembourg.

  All in all, Kate had to admit that Luxembourg had been a good choice, for the whole family. But it ended up compromised by the way it started. And by the Macleans.

  Now that the Luxembourg S.A. was establish
ed, now that Dexter was making a legitimate—and surprisingly lucrative—living through his investment enterprise, now that they had residency visas and E.U. driver’s licenses, now that they’d filed income taxes in Luxembourg … now that all that was done, did they need to remain in Luxembourg?

  No.

  IT WAS THE children who made friends on the beach at St. Tropez. And then the next day the grown-ups introduced themselves. And then the following day they were all together on the same beach again, and later in the week over lunch, chilled rosé and the cheerful babble of expat Americans on vacation. Kate listened to anecdotes of life in Paris, and the international school in St-Germain, and the newly soft real-estate market …

  Then they were on the early flight from Marseille, the boys’ hair washed and combed, shirts tucked, the taxi from the airport to the school, the quick interviews with the children and the longer ones with the adults. And then shaking hands with the admissions officer, smiling, listening to assurances that there were spots for the boys.

  They had snacks and drinks at the Flore. Then they set off again, a sultry summer weekday. They came across the agence immobiliere, its windows festooned with glossy photographs of apartments. They introduced themselves, and went on a quick house tour.

  In the morning, they signed the school’s contract, and the apartment’s lease.

  LUXEMBOURG SEEMED EMPTY in mid-August. Or empty of expats. Kate’s friends were all on family holidays—the Americans in America, the Europeans in rented seaside cottages in Sweden, or whitewashed villas in the mountains of Spain, or pastels with pools in Umbria.

  Kate walked around the old town, the familiar faces of the shopkeepers, the vendors in the Place Guillaume market, the waitresses on their cigarette breaks, the palace guards. All these people whose names she didn’t know, who were part of the texture of her life. She felt like she should say farewell to each and every one of them.