The Expats: A Novel

by Chris Pavone

  “Okay. What can you offer?”

  “The culprit on the stolen fifty million.”

  “Interesting.”

  “In return, I get my job back.”

  He nodded. “Delighted.”

  “Good,” she said.

  He reached across the table, his hand extended, to shake on it.

  “But,” she said, “there’s a complication.”

  His smile fell, along with his hand. “Which is …?”

  “I need immunity. For me. And my husband.”

  “Immunity? For putting bullets in Torres? Please. No one has ever even thought about investi—”

  “That’s not it.”

  “Is it another murder you’re talking about?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by another,” she said, still refusing to be incriminated in that old mess. “But no, it’s not a murder. It’s white-collar. Sort of.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “So do we have a deal?”

  Hayden didn’t respond for a few seconds, staring at Kate, waiting for her to say more. Finally resigning himself that she wouldn’t.

  “I’m sorry, Kate,” he said. “No.”

  Kate was due across the river in an hour, to meet Julia and Bill and Dexter. And she needed to get there early, before the others. Before her husband.

  She gazed out over the city, the streets that radiated from the museum, the mishmash of rooftops. Resigning herself that she would, after all, need to tell Hayden the truth. If not the entire truth, at least some more of it.

  Kate wonders if Hayden himself is in the work van around the corner, listening to this conversation. Or maybe he’s across the street, watching. When she left him two and a half hours ago, he was unclear what his involvement would be in the rest of the evening. Hayden was skilled at being unclear.

  “Your Hail Mary,” Kate says, turning her attention back to Julia, “was confronting me. But this got you nothing. Worse than nothing, because then we cut off all contact with you. You no longer had access to your suspect. Your investigation was now at a permanent-looking impasse. Game over. And suddenly the whole town seemed to be ostracizing you.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” Julia says. “Who’d you tell, what?”

  “I told Amber Mandelbaum, Southern Jewish supermom and gadfly extraordinaire, that Julia—my best friend!—had shoved her tongue down my husband’s throat. What a bitch. Obviously, we could no longer be friends.”

  “Obviously.”

  “So you left,” Kate says. “You didn’t have many friends to begin with—you weren’t in Luxembourg to make a real life, after all—and it probably came as a relief to you, Bill, to get away from your mistress. I imagine Jane was challenging. Demanding.”

  Julia bristles.

  “But I guess that technically speaking she wasn’t a mistress, since you weren’t really married to anyone else.”

  Bill remains unresponsive.

  “Anyway, you went back to Washington empty-handed. You were sorry—ashamed—to admit that you’d been mistaken: Dexter Moore was not the thief. Interpol file closed. You were back in the full-time clutches of the Bureau, the old grind. But after you’d invested so much time in such an expensive and spectacularly unsuccessful investigation, your star was glowing a lot less bright. Wasn’t it, Julia?”

  Julia doesn’t answer.

  “So it came as no surprise when you quit. Especially since it had become known that while you two were posing as a couple, you’d become an actual couple.”

  Bill shifts in his seat. Dexter is, once again, confused, and wearing it all over his face. Julia gives him a nod, an admission. He shakes his head in wonder.

  “This happens frequently, doesn’t it?” Kate continues. “Never happened to me, mind you. But I saw it happen plenty of times. To other operations officers.”

  Kate stops talking, wonders how much to push the rest of it, whether there’s any upside. She knows that one of the most dangerous, self-destructive indulgences is to go around proving how smart you are. It’s the type of thing that gets people shot.

  But she can’t seem to help herself. “So Julia, when did you bring Bill inside?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “To me it does.”

  “I told him after I quit,” Julia says. “After we quit.”

  Kate’s mind is dragged backward, through the past year and a half in France, back to Luxembourg, to the winter before last, past the night in the restaurant when she and Dexter had playacted for the benefit of the FBI’s transmitter, and the previous night when he’d come clean—almost entirely—to Kate.

  “You’d been seeing each other how long?”

  “A few months.”

  Kate glances at Bill, who’s been silent, letting someone else tell his side of the story. Or rather from his half of the narrative.

  “Why’d you tell him?”

  “I love him,” Julia says. “We’re making our lives together.” She holds up the ring finger. “We’re engaged.”

  “That’s nice,” Kate says, a wry half-smile. “Congratulations. But when did you guys first hook up?”

  “What do you care?” Bill asks. He’s now on alert, his sheath of calm slipping off. Kate suspects he knows exactly where her line of questioning is headed, and why.

  “I’m curious. Trying to get the whole story right.”

  Bill is staring at her, a hard look in his eyes, jaw muscles twitching. Kate knows that he knows that she knows.

  “Toward the end,” Julia answers. “Right before we left Luxembourg.”

  Kate’s mind alights on that outdoor bench in Kirchberg, when she was confronted by Bill and Julia in the cold.

  “So you weren’t together over Christmas, in the Alps?”

  Julia snickers.

  “On New Year’s Eve you didn’t get drunk and fuck?”

  Kate didn’t notice when Bill’s right hand disappeared under the table, but it did.

  “No.”

  Kate’s memory comes to a screeching halt back when Julia said “twenty-five million euros” and Bill looked confused, opening his mouth to say something, to correct Julia that the number was fifty million, but then closing it, letting Julia’s slip slide, letting it sit and simmer and stew, checking with the home office in D.C., confirming that the amount that had been stolen from the Colonel was fifty million, double what Julia had alleged to Kate’s face, a bizarre discrepancy, too neat and tidy to have been an utterly random case of misremembering, convinced that there must be a logical explanation, puzzling the possible reasons, and finally figuring it out, maybe seeing the whole plot from a bird’s-eye view, laid out underneath to be examined at leisure, understanding the immense amount of money at stake, and deciding to use his strengths—his looks and his charm and his ability to keep a giant secret, forever—against her weaknesses—her insecurity and loneliness and desperate desire to have a family, in the stark, unforgiving face of having absolutely no prospects for a husband.

  “Maybe,” Kate offers, “it was in Amsterdam?” She drops her hands into her lap, plants her palms on her thighs, and leans forward, shifting herself. Then she leans back in a different position, picking her left hand off her thigh and returning it to the table, this whole lean-shift maneuver a flimsy cover for leaving her right hand under the table, sliding into her handbag.

  Bill too shifts in his seat, less dramatically than Kate, but accomplishing, she knows, the same thing.

  Julia turns to her new beau. But not that new: this happened last January, a year and a half ago. A long time to be with someone you don’t love. Or maybe Bill really does love Julia, now. Maybe he grew into it.

  “Well,” Kate says, “Amsterdam was a romantic place, I guess. What with all the drugs and prostitutes around.” But she knows it was after Amsterdam. It was after the bench.

  Kate burrows her right hand slowly and quietly past her compact and sunglasses and chewing gum and notebook and pens and key ring and stray pieces of paper, al
l the way to the bottom of the bag, where the heaviest things rest. One of them under a hard panel, which she opens.

  They are now staring at each other, Kate and Bill, eyes locked. They’re surrounded by thousands of people in the Carrefour de l’Odeon, dusk in early September, the weather and light and wine and café all picture-perfect. The Europe of everyone’s imagination.

  Kate closes her fingers around the grip of her Beretta.

  Bill’s right hand is still under the table.

  Kate turns to Julia. An unhappy, lonely woman until this man came along. Now here they are, seemingly happy. Julia’s face is glowing, her cheeks a high pink.

  But there’s this giant deception at the foundation of their relationship, their happiness. This impure motive. There was that small mistake that the woman made, uttering the wrong number. And then the man reconstructed an entire intrigue, a big thick plot—a seduction and affair and relationship and marriage proposal, a whole life—around her error and his notice of it. Taking advantage of her lie.

  But does that make their relationship less real? Does that make it impossible that they genuinely love each other?

  She turns to Bill, sees hardness, resolve. What will he do to protect his secret?

  Kate and Bill are aiming handguns at each other, under the marble-topped table. Is he ready to kill her, now? Will he fire a gun here in the middle of Paris, shoot her in the gut? Will he become a permanent fugitive? Will he give up his whole life—his newly manufactured life—rather than allow Kate to reveal his truth to Julia?

  His truth is that he figured out what his partner—and their suspect—were up to, together. But instead of confronting Julia, he got in on the scam. Pretending he didn’t know what was going on; pretending to fall for her; pretending it was news when Julia finally told him the truth.

  Kate glances back to Julia, this odd woman, so brilliant in so many ways, but so unable—or unwilling—to see something so plainly that’s right in front of her eyes.

  But who knows? Maybe Julia sees the truth perfectly well. Maybe Julia saw the truth way back before it even became the truth: maybe her slip-up of twenty-five million wasn’t an error at all. Maybe she made a fake mistake, leading Bill on so that he would catch her, seduce her, marry her. Maybe she engineered that as well, along with the rest of the intricately manufactured long-play con.

  And maybe Dexter hadn’t left that yearbook in the living room by mistake.

  As Kate’s mind drifts, so do her eyes, ping-ponging between the conspirators and the contents of the tabletop, eventually resting on Julia’s wineglass. Barely an inch off the top. They’ve been at this table an hour and a half, on their second bottle. But Julia hasn’t had more than a couple of ounces. The woman who used to polish off a bottle at lunch is now guzzling water.

  Julia has put on five kilos, maybe ten. Her face is flush, radiant.

  “Oh my God,” Kate blurts out, “you’re pregnant!”

  Julia blushes. Despite her claim two years ago that she couldn’t bear children. Just another facet of the cover.

  Pregnant. That changes everything.

  Kate and Hayden sat under the glowing sky, puffs of white clouds scattered as if arranged to break up the monotony of blue, lit from beneath by golden rays of low-angle sunlight. A painterly scene, Vermeer light.

  Kate had never fully appreciated Northern European painting until she lived in Northern Europe. Until she realized that the artists’ skies were not fanciful inventions, not imaginary distortions of reality, but accurate reflections of a unique skyscape. This wasn’t what the sky looked like in Bridgeport, CT, or Washington, D.C., or Mexico City, DF, or any of the other places where she’d spent her life, sometimes staring at the sky.

  “You need to tell me,” Hayden said, “what the immunity would be for.”

  Their standoff resumed. But Kate knew that her stance was pure bluff, and his wasn’t. She’d have to give in. Because she’d finally figured out what she wanted, what she needed, and Hayden could give it to her. But he didn’t need a damn thing from her.

  Plus she was rushed, and had to wrap this up now, and get back to the Left Bank. “It’s for participating in the theft,” she said. “Of the fifty million.”

  Hayden picked up his glass, took a long drink of water, replaced the glass on the table, and resumed staring at Kate.

  “Think of it this way,” she continued, “this was exactly the sort of operation that the Company would’ve run. This Colonel was a blight on the planet. Not just a horrible person, but a destabilizing force, an irresponsible maniac whose weaponry would someday—if it hadn’t already—end up in the hands of people who wanted to do harm to Americans, maybe in America.”

  Hayden was unreadable.

  “So we—not me, mind you, but … anyway, this Colonel was taken down. And in the meantime his money didn’t end up in the hands of other people just like him. Plus there’s a bonus that I think you’ll find extra-inducing.”

  “Yes?”

  “The culprit—well, the other culprit—is, if you can imagine it, an FBI agent.”

  He laughed, a thick meaty chortle, accompanied by an uncharacteristic snort. He thought this was pretty damn funny. “So what about the money?”

  “We’ll give it back,” Kate said. “Well, not back, per se. We’ll give it to … I don’t know … you? Also, I have to admit that we don’t exactly have all of it …”

  Hayden looked away, at his colleagues across the rooftop, his minions, on the other side of the restaurant. Then back to Kate.

  “So,” she said. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Congratulations,” Kate says. “When are you due?”

  “I’m just … I’m not even four months yet.”

  “That’s great,” Kate says. She turns to Bill. “Congratulations.”

  His hand is still under the table, ready to protect his delicate, elegant wrapping of Julia’s bulky package of lies. What’s at stake for him is enormous: not just twenty-five million euros, but also a wife, a child. A whole life.

  Kate will let this drop. She will keep quiet about his duplicity, forever.

  She slides the Beretta back into the compartment at the bottom of her bag. She pulls her hand out, reaches across the table, lays her hand on Julia’s, the engagement diamond sharp against the hard skin in her palm, her tennis-grip callus. She gives Julia a caress with her thumb.

  Bill nods at Kate, a long blink, an unmistakable thank-you. He too shifts himself, and raises his arm, and wraps his newly empty right hand around his wineglass.

  Kate doesn’t want this woman to give birth in prison. She doesn’t want to be responsible for the compounded horrors of that situation.

  She already bears responsibility for something just as horrible.

  No: what she did was much more horrible.

  A TAXI HONKED on Park Avenue; the air brakes of an eighteen-wheeler screamed. Morning light filtered through the sheer drapes behind the thick velvet curtains, dust motes floating in the beams. A room-service tray was littered with uneaten toast, half-eaten eggs, slivers of crisp bacon, chunks of hash-brown potatoes. A silver pot of coffee and a china cup sat on an end table, the aroma filling the room, the pot gleaming in the sunlight.

  Torres’s blood was spreading in silent pools from his head and chest, soaking the carpet.

  The baby cried out again.

  A tremendous amount of information ran through Kate’s brain in a fraction of a second. She knew about Torres’s wife, the one who’d died a few years earlier from complications following routine surgery. That was old information.

  Kate didn’t have the new information about a new woman or a baby. Kate had done some research: what hotel and room, how many bodyguards, stationed where, when. She’d also done some planning: how to get from D.C. to NYC secretly, how to move between stations and destinations, where to dispose of the weapon, how to exit the hotel.

  But she’d been lazy and sloppy and impatient. She hadn’t done enough research; she hadn’t b
een exhaustive. She hadn’t learned everything there was to learn.

  So here was this surprise, this young woman standing in the doorway to the bedroom in the hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, turning her head in the direction of the noise of the crying baby, unable to fight the irrepressible instinct to tend to her child. Unaware that by breaking eye contact with Kate, by severing the human connection created by their gazes, she was allowing Kate to do the worst thing she’d ever done.

  This was Kate’s fault. It was her failure to plan the mission carefully. This was why she was going to march into her supervisor’s office tomorrow, and resign.

  In the next room, the baby cried again. Kate pulled the trigger.

  Kate glances down at the sugar container, considers the microphone hidden there. It was barely two hours ago that she was a mile to the north, across the river, plotting out her deal with Hayden. And now here she is, living it.

  It isn’t part of her deal to take these two into custody, or even to participate in their arrest. She simply has to get them to admit to everything, which she has nearly accomplished. And tomorrow she has to transfer the twenty-four million euros into a slush fund for covert ops in Europe. Which she herself is going to run.

  “Do you need something from Dexter, to access your half of the money?”

  Julia nods. But nodding isn’t good enough. “What?” Kate asks.

  “I need the account number. I have the user IDs and passwords, but I don’t know the account number.”

  Dexter also nods. It’s finally time. He reaches into his jacket pocket, withdraws a piece of paper. But Kate grabs his wrist.

  He turns to her quizzically. Everyone is confused, unsure of what’s going on. Even Kate: she’s surprised at the strength of her urge to forgiveness. Impossible to resist. She knows this is because of Julia’s pregnancy, turning a beastly villain into a sympathetic heroine, just like that. Kate is now rooting for Julia, not against her. For the most part.

  Kate’s left hand is wrapped around Dexter’s wrist, the small piece of paper folded up in his fist. With her right hand she upends the sugar tray, dumping the contents onto the table. She picks out the transmitter between thumb and forefinger, and holds it up for everyone to see. All eyebrows raise.