The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  “I’m Marina,” she says, giving her own false name. But he doesn’t know that she’s lying. At least she hopes not.

  She’s sitting on the low wall that separates the horizontal plane from the vertical, terrace from cliff, sea from sky. She puts down her glass, unsteady on the rough surface, tendrils of vegetation springing from the cracks and air bubbles of the volcanic rock. She shakes his hand, wonders if he can feel that her palm is moist, sweaty. He holds her hand a second too long, the unmistakable come-on, just as expected.

  She has never done this before. She has come close—everyone like her has come close, she supposes. But she’s never followed through, never gone all the way. She knew she’d be nervous at this point, but not this much, and it’s probably not going to get easier if it takes longer.

  It’s time.

  She picks up her glass to take the final sip, step number fifteen, and to initiate the most crucial sequence, the point of no return. But just as she’s raising the glass she senses movement, and she glances over her shoulder.

  It’s the waitress again, being solicitous.

  Marina supposes that the expected thing would be to ask the waitress for a glass, so this man can share her wine. She wants this man to stay with her, but she can’t invite him. That would seem too forward, unnatural. Suspicious.

  She cuts her eyes to her bottle, then away.

  He notices. “Would you mind if I had a glass with you?”

  “Um.” She cocks her head: a drunk woman realizing she’s a drunk woman who’s maybe about to make a mistake. “Sure?”

  “Signorina,” he says to the waitress, “un bicchiere, per favore?”

  So now she needs to wait. Waiting is most painful when you don’t expect to do it.

  MENDOZA

  There is of course a bottle of wine in his room, and candles to help Will explore every inch of Elle’s body, shoulders and breasts and neck and ears, the exquisite torture of extended foreplay, the lengths of her legs and the darkness between, straining and aching and finally exploding with spine-shuddering release.

  And then, spent, a reassuring glow from within that lasts just seconds before regret initiates its counterattack, marching into Will’s consciousness and establishing a forward position, accusatory and unforgiving, even as he’s still short of breath, lying there on the soft sheets in the large bed, with this naked nubility straddling him, slicked with a sheen of sweat, the scent of sex. Will can feel the burning of scratches on his back, the soreness of his overteased cock, which he knows will soon be aroused again, sucked again, fucked again, because they will stay awake till sunrise, engaging every conceivable position, indulging every fantasy and scenario, extracting every possible memory from one night, because this won’t—this can’t—ever happen again.

  He has imagined this moment before, the fantasy of a hotel bed on the other side of the world, with a beautiful woman who’s not his wife. The reality is far better than he imagined, while at the same time much worse.

  Elle climbs off him, and out of the bed, her body golden in the flattering flickering light. She pops a bottle top and pours herself a glass of water, drinks.

  Will spins off his side of the bed, unlocks the French doors, pushes them open, a refreshing breeze fluttering the curtains, cooling his overheated, over-aroused body. He looks out at the full moon, then falls back onto the bed.

  But she doesn’t. Instead, she’s rooting around on the floor. She finds her panties, pulls them on. Her bra too.

  “What are you doing?”

  She locates the tiny pile of her dress.

  “Why are you getting dressed?”

  She pulls the little black dress over her head, shimmies into it. “Well,” she says. “Thank you, Will Rhodes. I didn’t expect to enjoy that.”

  He doesn’t understand what she can possibly mean. He suddenly fears that he has fallen into the clutches of a psychopath. This possibility hasn’t been Will’s primary disincentive to adultery, but it has certainly ranked high on the list of compelling reasons to not cheat: the impossibility of knowing what another human being is capable of, motivated by, desperate for. Sex is putting your life in someone else’s hands. And unless you really know that person, you can’t know what will end up happening.

  Something odd is happening right now, that’s for sure, and Will doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know how to respond. Maybe this near stranger is playing some game, making Will’s heart race for the sheer entertainment of it, another type of tease.

  She sits on the edge of the bed and straps herself into her high heels, bright red fuck-me shoes of the highest order. She wipes a finger across her cheek. Is that a tear she just wiped away? Then she stands, and without glancing at Will or saying another word, she opens the door to the blindingly bright hall, and walks out.

  What? Did that really just happen?

  “Elle?” he calls out. “Hey! Elle?”

  Then Will lies there, half-expecting her to walk back in. Did she go get ice?

  A minute goes by. Two.

  Will climbs out of the bed, vibrating with nervous energy. He pours himself a glass of water, downs it in one go, refills the glass with shaky hands. He pulls on pajama bottoms, ties an awkward knot. He returns to the bed and glances at the digital clock, 2:48 A.M.

  He tries to lie still, confused, disturbed, staring at the ceiling. He pushes his hand through his hair, takes a deep breath. Did he just ruin his life?

  That’s when the door flies open.

  CAPRI

  The man is trying to impress her with anecdotes about a billionaire friend in Abu Dhabi, a gazillion-star resort in the Seychelles, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. I’m rich, I’m important; my dick is big, let me put it in you.

  Marina is not really listening. They’re sitting side by side on the low wall, just a couple feet high, not tall enough to stop someone determined to vault over it, but enough to prevent stumbling mistakes.

  She looks around the deserted terrace, and runs through her list again, the action steps, back to the beginning of their relationship, her initiation of that first encounter, a day and a half ago. A lot can develop during what looks like mostly nonevents:

  1. Pull out cigarette, try to light it, fail

  2. Look around for another smoker, go to him, get a light

  3. Depart without being friendly

  4. Reserve dinner table in person, for opportunity to check reservation book

  5. Cancel table

  6. Go to town for dinner, return via taxi

  7. Walk through dining room, stumble as if tipsy

  8. Pause, remove shoes, walk barefoot; all to draw attention

  9. Place first wireless scrambler on table, second wireless scrambler on gate

  10. When waitress arrives, order bottle of wine to terrace

  11. Dispose of portion of bottle into potted plant

  12. Pour two sips of wine into glass to dirty bowl and rim, take one sip

  13. Sit on wall and wait

  14. When man arrives, take final sip

  15. Walk to table to refill glass

  16. While walking, pull on glove in pocket

  17. Return to wall

  18. Stab man in neck with switchblade and push him off cliff

  MENDOZA

  Will returns to consciousness in layers. The first, outer layer is thin and vague, the sense that he’s being dragged across the grass, his heel catching on something, twisting his leg, ouch, then some time later dumped, plunk, ouch again.

  The second layer is thick, full of conjecture and fear and pain. There’s the pain in his nose and cheek and lip from the punch; in the back of his head where it collided with the earth. But that’s all nothing compared to the psychic pain of knowing that he’s in trouble, probably deep, and that the trouble is his own fault.

  Maybe some people know it when they’re about to make the mistake of their lives. Pulling the ski mask over your face and walking into the bank. Turning the ignition while seeing triple
from all that tequila. Not Will; Will hadn’t known it. Maybe he should have. Now he does.

  Will becomes aware that Elle is next to him, applying ice to his face, cubes in a washcloth. Will is reclined on the chaise in a corner. The man—the intruder—is across the room, upright in a chair, holding ice to his own face.

  Did Will really imagine that he could simply have sex with this woman, this beautiful stranger, and there wouldn’t be any consequences?

  “Don’t worry,” Elle says, “this isn’t as bad as you’re probably thinking.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Will demands, painful through his swollen lip, too terrified to wait for these people’s pace of explanation.

  The man puts down his ice pack, picks up his phone, says, “One of your wife’s email addresses”—huh?—“is Chloe dot M dot Palmer at Travelers dot com. Isn’t that right? She still uses her maiden name professionally?”

  What the fuck kind of question is this? “Are you trying to extort me?” Will asks.

  Elle rises from the bed, walks to the bathroom, leaves the door open. She runs the tap and rinses the washcloth, wrings it out, rewraps it with fresh ice.

  “But I don’t have any money. You know that.”

  “No.” She reapplies the icepack to his cheek. “Extortion is not what’s going on. Not exactly.”

  Her voice sounds different now, though Will can’t place how.

  “I could send Chloe an email this instant,” the man says. He holds up his phone, look, I’ll prove it to you. The same device with the incontrovertible evidence. This phone is Will’s enemy. “Or I could send it tomorrow. Or next week.”

  Will feels like he missed something important. Maybe they were explaining while he was still emerging from the unconscious? And he missed crucial information?

  “Or I could send Chloe an email never. Instead, I could transfer ten thousand dollars into your bank account, which I believe is exactly what you need to clear the building-department violations, and resume construction.”

  Will has definitely seen this man before. Short-cropped gray hair and a firm, square jaw, very closely shaved; thin eyebrows that hover like beach umbrellas over dark beady eyes, with a long scar looking like its handle, on an angle, in a stiff wind; deep crevasses of lines across the forehead, a permanent indentation between the eyes, a sneer on his lips. This looks like a mean, angry person. His posture is rigid, shoulders back, everything tight and coiled. A cop, maybe, or military. A man who’s comfortable with violence.

  Will glances at Elle. Is this really the same person he was in bed with just minutes ago? Also the person who punched him in the face while he was sprinting across the lawn?

  “Then I could transfer another ten thousand dollars into your account next month. And I could repeat this transfer every month. Indefinitely.”

  Will looks around, trying to figure out the vantage of the hidden camera. His gaze settles on the desk, the bright turquoise numbers of the digital clock.

  “Bingo,” Elle says, confirming his suspicion.

  Will realizes what’s different about her: she no longer has an accent. “You’re not Australian,” he says. “You’re American?”

  “And then some.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  The man reaches into his pocket, and removes his wallet. He slides a stiff laminated card out of a slot, and tosses it toward Will with a spin, as if dealing blackjack on felt.

  Will realizes where he’s seen this man before: a month ago, on a dark quiet street after a wine-bar dinner. “You were following me? In Paris?”

  Will looks down at the ID, turns the thing over, then again to the front. “How do I know what this is?”

  “I guess you don’t,” the man says. “But if it’s fake, you have to admit it’s pretty good. Right? Look at that hologram, the paper pattern, the biometric photo. That’s a professional-looking ID. Didn’t come out of some video-arcade vending machine.”

  Will doesn’t have any way of assessing any of this.

  “Do arcades exist anymore?” the man continues, pursuing this irrelevancy. “Or does everyone now play video games at home, sitting around rec rooms in their underwear?”

  “We can provide methods of verification,” Elle interrupts. “There are people you could call. We could arrange for you to visit headquarters, though honestly that would be complicated, and sort of inadvisable. But possible.”

  Will feels bile churning. God, he really doesn’t want to throw up, heaping humiliation onto an already tall pile of unpleasant emotions. On the other hand, maybe vomiting would complete the set, a full complement of all the ways in which he could feel crappy at once. Maybe there’d be a satisfaction in that, the accomplishment of perfect debasement.

  He swallows his peristalsis.

  “What the fuck,” he says, through gritted teeth, “do you want from me?”

  “Not much,” Elle answers.

  “That can’t be true.”

  “Well,” Elle says, “the reality is that it wouldn’t be much for you to do, and it wouldn’t be dangerous. But the results would be meaningful to us.”

  “Just a little information,” the man interjects. He seems intent on proving his value, despite the evidence that it’s the woman who has done everything.

  “Fuck you.”

  Elle prickles, and Will is briefly worried that she’s going to smack him; he hadn’t even considered the possibility of that bonus humiliation. Then her face softens into a wry smile. “But Will Rhodes, you already did that.”

  Will wants to throttle this horrible person.

  “Listen,” she says, softening her tone to comradely, reasonable. “This is not a negotiation. But you don’t have to make your decision right now. You have till breakfast.”

  She stands, and so does her burly companion.

  “You’ll become an asset of the CIA, Will Rhodes. Or we’ll ruin your life.”

  CAPRI

  She leans over the wall and stares into the black void, trying to adjust her eyes to the total darkness, to see something down there. But no, nothing.

  She can’t believe she just did what she just did, can’t believe how quickly it happened. It took only a second to kill a person, to end a human being’s life. A quick jab to the trachea, completely unexpected; he never even began to defend himself.

  She’d been hoping that she wouldn’t have to use the knife, that she’d be able to simply push him over. But his body position had been wrong; he’d looked balanced, steady, like he might be able to withstand even her most violent shove, and then where would she be? Screwed. She’d be in hand-to-hand combat with someone bigger and stronger and, probably, a better fighter.

  She’d purchased the knife from an obviously disreputable shop near the Naples train station, a well-known locus of disreputability, an open market for petty criminal enterprises, nonpetty ones too. She never touched the knife with her bare skin, never left a fingerprint on it. So she could leave the weapon where it was, lodged deeply and securely in the man’s neck; removing it would’ve risked spraying everything—including herself—with his blood. Then she shoved him into the void. He disappeared without a sound; she didn’t hear him hit bottom.

  She had prepared plans for other scenarios, of course; she hadn’t been absolutely confident that she’d be able to seduce him. And she’d been halfway afraid that he’d catch on, try to kill her. But he was thinking with his penis, exactly what she’d counted on, the high-percentage play.

  Her entire body seems to be vibrating, as if the blood in her veins has been replaced with high-voltage electricity, everything tingling. She needs to be careful now. It’s easy to kill someone; what’s hard is not getting caught.

  With trembling hands she removes the packet of disinfecting wipes from her pocket, uses one to clean the wineglasses—his and her own—and the bottle. She flings all three objects in a direction that she knows is something like a seventy-degree pitch, too steep for investigators to canvass, not to mention t
errain that’s covered with vegetation that’ll capture this evidence, prevent it from tumbling down to shore, where it would be more easily retrieved. That’s where they’ll eventually find the corpse.

  She removes the latex glove, rolls it inside out, capturing any blood inside. She shrugs off her linen jacket, which is possibly spattered; it’s hard to see in this light. She rolls the jacket into a tight cylinder, which she also puts into her bag.

  She strides quickly across the terrace to the pool. She kneels, and washes her hands and forearms and face in the cool water. She puts on a thin silk sweater, and running shoes, and a red-and-gold Roma cap, and a pair of clunky-framed eyeglasses with clear lenses.

  That’s when she hears the faint click of the door handle engaging.

  Shit.

  Of all the people this could be, please let it not be the waitress. Please.

  She’s facing away from the hotel’s door. It would be unnatural if she didn’t turn to look at whoever was interrupting her privacy, so she does, a glance over her shoulder, with her heart in her stomach.

  It’s no one, an older couple, the man wearing a pale jacket and woven loafers, the woman multiple strands of pearls and no deficiency of hairspray.

  The man notices her, says, “Buona sera.”

  “Buona sera,” she answers. All she needs to do is retrieve her wireless scramblers, and get the hell out of here. She won’t return to her room, where she didn’t touch anything except when wearing latex gloves. She left plenty of DNA around, but that’s very different from fingerprints.

  The old couple are now at the wall. The woman looks down, leans forward, cranes her neck. What is she looking for? Her husband also leans over the precipice, and they both talk quietly, in Italian.

  The man looks at Marina, then down again. Could he possibly see anything?

  There’s suddenly a boat out there, a decent-sized yacht with a lot of lights, pulling into the cove.

  She puts her bag on her shoulder, strides toward the door, reaches for the handle, stops herself just in time. She turns, looks around, plucks a towel from a neat stack, uses it to grab the handle. Inside, she retrieves the scrambler from the buffet table, and walks back out to the terrace. She refolds the towel and leaves it at the top of the stack.