The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  She wished her friends were here, now. She felt the urge to sit in a café with Claire and Cristina and Sophia, have a final round of coffee, a final round of hugs. But it was probably better this way. She hated good-byes.

  Kate returned to the apartment, a ham sandwich in a wax-paper bag, and resumed the task of sorting through the boys’ toys, picking out the discards, the donations, the keepers. They were with Dexter at the pirate-ship playground, for the last time.

  It would be easier, Kate knew, the second time around. The hard parts would be less hard, the fun parts more fun. Like with the second kid, Ben: it would be less intimidating, less difficult, less bewildering, with the benefit of the prior experience.

  They still needed to maintain some type of Luxembourg residency, a place from which to file taxes, where they could pretend to live. The little rented farmhouse in the Ardennes, for a thousand a month, would serve perfectly. There was a pile of farmhouse-bound boxes shoved into the corner of the living room, packed with inexpensive lamps and cast-off dishes and mismatched flatware. With a lock-box where they would stash a million in cash.

  The Colonel’s money was otherwise untouched, sitting in the same numbered account, possibly forever. It was now twenty-four million.

  Kate looked out the window at the expansive view, the broad swath of Europe in her sight line, this brief home of hers. Tears welled in her eyes. She felt a heavy weight of despair at the end of this. At the inexorable march of her life forward, toward its inevitable end.

  32

  TODAY, 7:32 P.M.

  The memories are beginning to fade, to take on an undefined tinge at the edges, a vagueness that creeps toward the center, eroding Kate’s confidence that the events actually occurred. It would make a lot more sense if she had imagined this whole thing, her whole life. Now would just be now, attached to some other, more straightforward past.

  It’s been a year and a half since Kate and Julia were standing in the freezing rain on the exposed platform hanging over the monteé du Clausen, both armed and angry and unsure if one of them was going to have to kill the other.

  Now in this Parisian café they meet each other’s eyes sheepishly, like new lovers after their first fight.

  Julia’s body is leaning toward Bill’s, pulled magnetically. There’s something different in the way this woman and that man are together now. Perhaps more natural than they’d been before, back in Luxembourg. More something. Or maybe less.

  “So,” Julia says, “what have you been up to?” She directs this to Kate. Now that the men have finished the men’s business of arms deals and dismemberments.

  Kate glances at Dexter. He doesn’t meet her eye, won’t offer any guidance. He seems completely comfortable, as if there’s no possible downside to this interaction, nothing that can go wrong, no bad turn it can take. Which makes Kate doubly sure that she’s right about what really happened among them. Triply. Kate is immeasurably sure.

  What she doesn’t understand is how she’s supposed to converse with these people, as if they’re all normal, and this is a real meeting among genuine friends, or even a tense confrontation between foes. What degree of honesty could Julia be expecting? What type of conversation does this woman think they’re going to have?

  “Why Paris?” Julia asks. She hopes maybe a more specific question will generate an answer.

  “Why not?” is Kate’s terse response.

  Bill holds up his hands, gesturing at their surroundings. “Because this?” he asks. “This is fucking awful.”

  There’s a pleading in Julia’s eyes. “Come on, Kate. I’m not asking for much, here. We don’t need to be … friends …”

  Kate turns her eyes down.

  “But we don’t have to be enemies, Kate. We’re not enemies. We’re not here … this isn’t …” She trails off, stares off.

  Kate takes a long look at Julia, hands folded, elbows on the table, leaning forward, eyebrows raised, head cocked at an angle, eager to hear any tiny irrelevant detail of any beside-the-point story. Anything. In this pose of avidness, Kate thinks she recognizes something odd: friendship.

  “I …” Kate suddenly feels terribly sad. “What do you want me to tell you, Julia?”

  “I don’t know, Kate. Anything. Do you miss Luxembourg?”

  Kate shrugs.

  “I do,” Julia admits. “I miss my friends. I miss you, Kate.”

  Kate has to look away, fighting the urge to cry.

  “Ladies,” Bill says, raising his glass. “Let’s not be maudlin. To Luxembourg!”

  Kate watches Julia raise her glass, slosh some wine on her lips, then replace the glass on the tabletop. “To Luxembourg.”

  “So forgive my bluntness,” Kate says, taking the step that no one else seems willing to take, “but why are you here?”

  Julia and Bill exchange a quick glance. “We came,” Julia says, “to tell you—to tell Dexter—about the Colonel.”

  “Ah.” Kate nods. “I see.”

  Silence again.

  “I don’t understand,” Kate picks up, “why that needs to be in person. In fact, I don’t understand why you would want to do that at all. Dexter is, after all, someone you investigated—accused—of a major crime, of which you obviously still think he’s guilty.”

  “We were also friends,” Julia says.

  Kate leans forward. “Were we?”

  They stare at each other, the two women. “I thought so. I still do.”

  “But …” Kate tries to paint her bewilderment—her betrayal—all over her face.

  “I was doing—we were doing—what we needed to do.”

  Kate is relieved that Julia isn’t claiming she was just doing her job. At least she’s being honest about that. Because her job was the last thing she was doing.

  “There’s something else,” Bill says, rejoining the fray. “We wanted to tell you that now that the Colonel is dead, the investigation is closed.”

  “Completely?” Dexter asks.

  For a moment everyone sits quietly in the loud Parisian twilight. Bill empties his glass, refills it. “Completely. And permanently.”

  A blue-suited policeman is leaning on a car, flirting with a young woman who’s straddling a moped, smoking a cigarette. Kate’s eyes are drawn to the cop’s carelessly dangling gun. It would be easy to overcome him, to seize his weapon while he’s distracted with other, more French, priorities.

  Kate turns back to her companions. Are any of these people ever going to come clean with her? Will she herself come completely clean with any of them?

  For the past year, Kate had been thoroughly honest with Dexter. Or nearly. And she’d thought he’d been thoroughly honest with her. But she was disabused of that illusion this afternoon. Now she can’t believe it had taken her all this time to check his yearbook; now she sees there was a tremendous degree of denial in that oversight.

  It was just a small photo she found, poorly reproduced in washed-out color. Third row from the top of the page, second from the right: an unremarkably pretty woman with a big smile and pale pink lip gloss and feathered blond hair.

  “So,” Kate says, “what are you going to do with your half?”

  The same unremarkably pretty woman now sitting across the table, eyebrows raised, smile wiped away, pretending to be surprised. “Our half of what?”

  “Your half of the money.”

  Neither Julia nor Bill responds in any way—no facial expression, no body movement, no sound, no nothing: the practiced non-response of the professional liar. But these two are too obvious about it. They’re not as good actors as Kate would’ve thought; not nearly as good as she herself is. Maybe it’s true what everyone in the CIA has been asserting for the half-century grudge match between the institutions: FBI agents are just not as good as CIA ones. Or maybe they, like Kate herself, are simply out of practice.

  “What money?” Julia asks.

  Kate smiles patronizingly. “Haven’t decided yet?” She glances at each of her three companions, at the
protective veneers they’re all wearing, trying to mask the different lies they’ve told one another. The lies they’re all continuing to try to maintain. Hoping these lies will carry them through the rest of their full and satisfying lives, despite the truths they’ve chosen not to tell the most important people in their worlds.

  Kate keeps her eyes on the primary culprit, Julia. When Kate realized this afternoon that Dexter and Julia—real name of Susan Pognowski—had known each other in college, her first thought was that this was a plan they’d hatched together, way back then, or soon after. But she couldn’t reconcile this scenario with the reality of her Dexter. He was not that type of person. He was not a manipulator. He was the type of person who got manipulated.

  Kate realized that this was it—Julia had masterminded the whole thing, tricked everyone. There had never been anything sexual between her and Dexter, nothing romantic. Just an extraordinary degree of deviousness and a mind-boggling capacity for planning and foresight.

  Staring at that yearbook photo for the first time, Kate was hurt, and angry, and betrayed, and confused. But walking the noisy crowded streets of Paris, she’d figured out the whole thing, piece by piece. And as the puzzle unfolded, Kate became less and less angry at Dexter, more and more astounded by Julia. Standing in the rue St-Benoit, at the elegant turn formed by the corner of Le Petit Zinc, Kate forgave Dexter. After she’d walked another block, she’d revised her entire life’s plan. And by the time she entered her apartment a few minutes later, she was ready to take the necessary action.

  Kate understands why Dexter had to keep this particular secret from her. Because admitting it would entail admitting something else—that he knew Kate was CIA but never acknowledged it—that he couldn’t abide. He couldn’t stomach the thought of admitting to his wife the full extent to which he’d lied to her.

  Dexter doesn’t know that he’s been forgiven. All he knows is that his ultimate deception has just been unearthed. He’s now bristling with anxiety, barely able to stay seated. Kate is reminded of how she used to buckle the children into their high chairs so they wouldn’t escape during meals. She imagines herself reaching over and snapping Dexter into his caned café chair, buckling him in. This surreal image makes her smile.

  Kate’s smile gives Julia the courage to break the silence. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Which prompts Kate to say, “I’m talking about your half of the fifty million euros.” And then for good measure she adds, “Susan.”

  Bill nearly chokes on his wine.

  “Please,” Kate says, “interrupt me when I get something wrong. Okay?”

  Bill and Julia and Dexter all glance at one another in turn, the Three Stooges. They nod in unison.

  “No one here grew up in Illinois,” Kate says. “Bill, you didn’t attend Chicago. Julia, you didn’t go to any branch of the University of Illinois. You created this Chicago background because you knew I’d never been there, had no friends there. We’d never get a six-degrees-of-separation game off the ground. Bill, you’re sort of irrelevant. You two”—she points to Dexter, Julia—“you met in one of two places: you were in the same dorm, or some type of small class. I’m guessing first semester freshman year.”

  For a moment neither Dexter nor Julia answers, both in knee-jerk denial that their jig is finally up. “Dorm,” Julia admits, the first of the two to arrive at the conclusion that the truth—or at least this truth—is no longer avoidable. “Freshman year.”

  “And something pushed your relationship beyond dorm-mates. What?”

  “We had a class together, second semester,” Julia says. “French.”

  “So you were fast friends as freshmen, when it was easy to become friends with anyone. Just like being an expat.”

  Kate has a flashback to the day she met Julia. That night, standing with Dexter in their bathroom, brushing teeth side by side, telling him that their new life felt like freshman year. And she’d met a woman from Chicago. Dexter had kidded that Kate couldn’t be friends with this new woman, what with her pretend antipathy toward Chicago. He’d been so cool. Kate had never imagined her husband capable of such deception. She’s impressed with Dexter, despite it all.

  “But you gravitated into different cliques,” Kate continues. “By graduation, you weren’t really friends anymore. No one from college would identify you as friends. If your classmates were interviewed, none of them would remember that you two had been close. Because basically only the two of you knew about your relationship, right? You had no public history. Only your private one.”

  Still no responses. No corrections.

  “So fifteen years went by. You”—inclining her head at Julia—“were working at the FBI. Your specialty was investigating cyber crime. Online consumer banking had exploded, going from zero to billions in a couple years, then in another half-decade it was pretty much all the money in the world, transferred via the web. You’d become an expert investigator in this field, at the top of the FBI pecking order. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Kate turns to Dexter. “You were working at a bank. You too had become a different type of leading expert, in the same field. Then one day, out of the blue and out in public, you ran into your old friend, your ex-friend. Where did this happen?”

  “A bookstore,” Dexter answers quietly.

  “How quaint. So here in a bookstore, this old friend invited you to a drink, right? Sure, you answered, I’d love to catch up. So you met at some M Street bar, engaged in idle chitchat, then bam, Julia laid out this scheme of hers. She’d figured out a way for your expertise and hers to dovetail into a massive payday. Someday. Yes?”

  “Basically.”

  “Her plan was that if you two could figure out how to hack banking transactions, and you could execute the theft, she could guarantee that you wouldn’t get caught. Because she’d be the one doing the chasing. You two would split the booty.

  “So you must’ve danced around each other. Julia, you must’ve monitored him. Us. You discovered that I’d run out of steam in my career. That we had no money. That Dexter, unlike other computer nerds of his generation, had never even come close to making a fortune. He was mildly bitter about this, and he was financially motivated.”

  Kate stares at the diabolical woman across the table, with her relatively feckless partners on either side of her. “And of course you knew he harbored a deep-seated long-term revenge fantasy against the person who murdered his brother.” Still debating whether she’s going to let this huge cat out of the bag. Yes or no, no or yes …

  Kate opens her mouth to add the new twist, the single-word accusation. The word that will change everything for Dexter, again: “Supposedly.”

  33

  TODAY, 8:08 P.M.

  Dexter is obviously confused. Bill too. Both men’s brows are furrowed.

  “What do you mean, supposedly?” Dexter asks.

  Julia steels her jaw, narrows her eyes. She knows that Kate knows the truth. And she knows that Kate is about to reveal it.

  “While you were considering her proposal, Dex”—Kate turns back to her husband—“in the midst of your due diligence, did you receive an update about the Colonel? Something extra-compelling about how evil he was?”

  Dexter doesn’t shake his head, doesn’t nod, doesn’t blink, doesn’t open his mouth. He stares, thinking, racing to catch up with his wife, to arrive at the conclusion before she says it aloud, to avoid that particular aspect of his humiliation.

  Kate gives her husband a grin, a bit of a boast of victory. Bad sportsmanship, admittedly. Even though she’s forgiven him, she’s still enjoying the look of embarrassed surprise on his face.

  “Of course you did, sweetheart.” She feels entitled to extract some revenge, which is this, now: revealing that he’d been conned by this person whom he trusted. It will be painful, but it won’t last long. Unlike the con itself, which spanned a decade.

  Kate can practically hear Dexter’s gears churning, smell the smoke, as he figures o
ut that his anonymous Croatian source was bogus, an imposter, another paid actor in the complexly plotted play. Dexter turns to the playwright, Julia.

  Here is his aha moment. His mouth actually falls open.

  “You were my source?”

  Julia stares at Dexter unapologetically. “Yes.”

  His eyes are bugged. He’s trying to digest the enormity of this revelation, reaching back into his memory for the new beginning of this story. “I told you about Daniel’s death,” he says, “back in college?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when you first started working at the FBI, you looked into it? That’s when you found out that the Colonel was the one who’d killed Daniel?”

  Kate sees the childlike expression on Dexter’s face. A grown man who’s desperately willing reality to bend to his conception. Hoping that if he asserts his idea aloud and with confidence, the world will agree with him.

  This is exactly how the children sound and look when they’re testing theories about pirates or dinosaurs or space-travel options. “If we let our hair grow long, like birds,” Ben explained to her, just this morning, “then we’d be able to fly. Right, Mommy?”

  Julia doesn’t say anything, reticent to be the one to shatter this last iota of Dexter’s naïveté.

  He looks into his wineglass. Kate can see that he’s peeling back the layers: if there had never been any secret Croatian source, that meant there had never been a State Department official who connected him with the source. Which meant there had never been a report on the brutality of Daniel’s death. Which meant …

  “Colonel Petrovic didn’t have anything to do with Daniel’s death, did he?”

  Kate reaches her hand across the table, takes her husband’s, squeezes.

  “Wow,” Dexter says. His eyebrows have climbed as high as they can up his forehead. He pulls his hand out of Kate’s, leans away from the table, retreating into himself, seeking privacy in his humliation. “Wow.”

  “I’m sorry,” Julia says. “Petrovic was still an awful, awful person. He—”