The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

“I’ll get it out of you sooner or later, Rhodes. You know that, right?”

  —

  Malcolm buttons his jacket, pushes back his hair, checks his plain ordinary manila folder. He’s dubious of people who bring accessories like padded-leather presentation folders to meetings, résumés on extra-heavy textured paper, ballplayers with matched sets of superfluous gear, overcompensation, distracting from a dearth of convincing content with an excess of compelling package. Malcolm plays tennis in tee shirts; he comes to meetings with manila folders.

  The executive conference room is large and airy, floor-to-ceiling windows onto the avenue. The long high-gloss table is surrounded by occupied chairs, people he mostly doesn’t recognize, though at the head is a well-known man in a well-tailored suit.

  “Hi, my name is Malcolm Somers. I’m the editor of Travelers.”

  A few heads nod at him, in hello and agreement, okay guy, let’s get started.

  “I may be biased—I am, obviously, biased—but I think our founding was one of the greatest product launches ever. In today’s era in which consultants are paid to craft so-called authentic brand narratives, our origin story doesn’t need any embellishments.”

  Malcolm punches a button on the laptop, and the preloaded PowerPoint launches behind him. PowerPoint, like leather presentation folders, is something that Malcolm suspects is used more for obfuscation than for clarification. But a decade in conference rooms has beaten out his recalcitrance, and he finally gave in, and asked his tech guru, Stonely Rodriguez, for a tutorial.

  “It’s 1945, the waning months of the war. Benjamin Donaldson has been recuperating in Walter Reed from life-threatening injuries sustained in France, the Nazis’ last gasp.” A black-and-white photo, a man with a circumspect smile under blackened eyes. “Benji had been stabbed in Marseille, massive hemorrhaging, almost died in that alley near the old port.”

  Malcolm wrote a script for this, printed it out, rehearsed in a mirror, then discarded the pages. He never reads aloud, except bedtime stories. And at this point he has dozens of the kids’ books memorized, so even his read-alouds aren’t, technically, reading aloud.

  “But before his encounter with the switchblade, Benji had seen a lot of France, and had been awestruck by the beauty.” Click, black-and-white shots of the beach at St-Tropez, the Provençal massifs, medieval villages, intercut with color reproductions of Van Gogh’s wheat fields, Monet’s cathedrals.

  “So Benji is bored to death there in the hospital, trying to figure out what to do with his life. Before the war, he’d gone to Dartmouth, then New York, a job in pulp magazines. He figures that’s the business to which he’ll return. But he can’t get his mind off Europe. And he thinks there are a lot of guys like him, millions of them, servicemen who’d gotten a glimpse of Europe and the South Pacific and North Africa, guys who’d seen some of the world.”

  Click, click, click: the azure waters of the Blue Grotto in Capri, sand dunes in the Sahara, a tropical lagoon in the South Pacific.

  “Benji has a vision for a new breed of American tourist. He foresees falling costs for air travel, and rapid expansion of routes; he expects a strong dollar. In fact, Benji anticipates all the factors that contribute to an unprecedented postwar tourist boom. And because he’s from a magazine background, he envisages a new glossy to cater to this heretofore nonexistent demo: the middle-class international traveler.

  “Benji raises money. He hires accomplished journalists and photographers, all suffering combat fatigue, PTSD before it had a name. All looking for a less gruesome version of their occupation.”

  Malcolm pauses, glances around, signaling that another type of comment is coming. He does this whenever he tells this story. “Their experience is something I can relate to. After years of covering Afghanistan and Iraq, and sustaining injuries—IED shrapnel in the shoulder and torso—I still wanted to write, but I no longer wanted to fear for my life.”

  One of the reasons Malcolm went abroad was to see what war was like. To be around mortal danger, to feel scared, all the time. He can’t believe, now, his recklessness then. This is probably what it means to be middle-aged: to be horrified by the irresponsibility of your own youth.

  Maybe it was for the best. If he hadn’t gotten injured, he wouldn’t have come home, he wouldn’t have this wife, these kids, this job, his life. He might instead be dead, blown up in a hotel, or kidnapped and murdered, like their African correspondent, just last year.

  “Benji’s overseas personnel are joined in New York by cutting-edge designers and visionary editors. This energetic staff creates nothing short of a cultural sensation.”

  Click: the cover of volume 1, issue 1.

  “From the debut, Travelers’ pages are packed with stunning photographs—think Life, without the depressing stuff—that accompany long, evocative, in-depth articles—nearly novella-length, New Yorker–esque. Travelers is providing a total immersion, catering not only to the moneyed and/or adventurous who actually buy PanAm and TWA tickets, but also to the bigger, more rapidly expanding audience of armchair travelers. A demo practically invented by Travelers. This audience is irresistible to advertisers in the golden age of print, and Travelers is turning a profit within five years.”

  Click: a chart of gross revenues, ad pages, net profits. A few heads nod appreciatively at this turn toward the more concrete, measurable subject of finances. One guy even writes something down.

  “Travelers receives a steady stream of mail, which Benji reads compulsively. He learns that many of these passionate reader-travelers have something in common: they want more. More advice, more specific. So he experiments with methods of delivering more to these readers: destination-specific newsletters, special issues, seminars.”

  Click, click: covers of special issues on Tuscany and Portugal.

  “But what the audience really wants is not something that can be delivered to them en masse, because it’s something unique, something tailored to them personally. Something that would be impossible to supply by a bunch of American writers who visit France a few times a year and while there spend most of their time plastered, chasing women.”

  A couple of chuckles, but the man at the head of the table remains impassive. Malcolm can’t tell if he’s enjoying this story or hating it or has heard it before.

  “Benji decides to try a gambit that has absolutely nothing to do with magazines.”

  Click: a modest storefront on the rue de Rivoli.

  “The first bureau of the Travelers International Booking Service is Paris, naturellement. A one-year lease across the street from the Louvre and down the block from the Meurice, around the corner from Place Vendôme, the Ritz. The mission is explicitly to service American tourists who want more than just guidebook Paris. They want access.”

  Click: the opulent dining room of Le Grand Véfour.

  “They want impossible dinner reservations. They want private invitations, insider information, exclusive experiences. They’re willing to pay handsomely for an enhanced version of travel. The brand they trust to provide this service? Travelers.”

  Click: a black-and-white photo of a dapper man, leaning on a cane.

  “Benji hires an outgoing Parisian named Jean-Pierre Fourier, who quickly proves himself adept at helping well-off Americans have a superlative time in Paris. Jean-Pierre arranges Notre Dame tours and off-hours Louvre visits; he reserves tables at the best restaurants and most exclusive cafés; procures invitations to fashionable parties and books cars to Versailles, tee times at Morfontaine, sold-out tickets to the opera and ballet and the lovely concerts in La Sainte-Chapelle. He can also be counted on to arrange girls, discreetly.”

  Malcolm sees one of the women glance down; a man crosses his legs. Some people are uncomfortable with this reference. The man at the head of the table isn’t one of them.

  “It turns out that there is no luxury, no exclusive experience, that American tourists cannot be convinced they want, maybe even need. That first cramped storefront leads the follow
ing year to a bigger storefront, and then a whole building, in a quieter, more polished part of town, equally convenient to a certain type of tourist, less so to others.

  “The Paris bureau is successful not only as a travel agency, but just as important as a brand extension, with the magazine fueling the agency and vice versa, both entities enhancing the other.”

  Click: an elegant storefront near the Via del Corso in Rome. “We open bureaus in Rome, in Florence, in Madrid and Barcelona, in Athens and London. The investments are reasonable, the exposure minimal, the audience established, the margins impressive.”

  Click, click, click: magazine covers from the fifties, sixties, seventies.

  “The same factors that led to the magazine’s initial success help the bureaus thrive. After Western Europe, expansion follows into North Africa, Asia, the Mideast and Latin America, and eventually Eastern Europe after the fall of the Wall.

  “Meanwhile, the magazine continues to break new ground, to hire the best talent, to win awards, to dominate the market. The Travelers brand steadily expands its influence and profitability, the category leader according to every measure. By the nineties there are three dozen bureaus on six continents, ten special issues every year, as well as the most ad pages and largest circulation in the category.”

  Click, click: eighties, nineties.

  “Then what happens?”

  Click: black screen. Malcolm looks around the room. Everyone knows the answer, but like a roomful of middle-schoolers, no one wants to answer when everyone knows.

  “I did,” says the man at the far end of the table.

  Malcolm meets the man’s gaze across twenty feet of richly oiled teak, a Midcentury Danish table that was acquired to decorate this office when both were brand-new.

  “I happened.”

  The two men stare at each other from opposite sides of the divide, the new-media baron who intends to buy the old-media bastion. They both appear to be the same age, with probably the same schooling, with overlapping social circles that further overlap their business circles, Venn diagrams with vast intersections. Malcolm is surprised they’d never met until a month ago, never shook hands on the Hamptons sands, never shared a fund-raiser ten-top at the Cipriani Ballroom, both wearing tuxedos custom-tailored at Sam’s on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong.

  “That’s right. The content world shifted on its axis. The old delivery mechanism—paper, printed and bound and shipped to newsstands and drugstores around the country, and directly to customers’ mailboxes—was in large part replaced by the web. The old fee structure—consumers paying to consume content, supplementing the revenue generated by the ads targeted at those consumers—has also been replaced by a new model.”

  Click: home page of travelers.com.

  “I don’t want to make light of this revolution—not your role in it, sir, nor the immense changes in brand identities and consumer loyalties that it has engendered. But to many consumers—to many readers—these changes are irrelevant. What hasn’t changed for them is the content they love, nor the brands they trust to deliver it.”

  Click: the Travelers logo.

  Malcolm glances around the room again, looking for overt skepticism. He doesn’t notice any, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. His eyes again find the emotionless gaze of the person who’ll probably be his new boss.

  “So. The print magazine has seen a drastic decrease in circulation. I’m sure this is a surprise to exactly no one anywhere. On the other hand, the website, and the electronic editions, are robust, and steadily growing in unique users. Overall, our audience is growing.”

  Click: another chart, big numbers, getting bigger.

  “Also not surprisingly, the travel services took a hit. We’ve shuttered quite a few overseas bureaus.”

  Click: map of the world, 1998, with stars at bureaus. Then half fade away, to today.

  “On the other hand, we’ve discovered that there’s a not insignificant population who aren’t looking for more information, more discounts, more options. They’re not looking for more, period. They’re looking for better. Better recommendations, better choices. They’re looking for this word that’s being bandied about relentlessly these days: curated experiences.

  “And what’s the essence of a curated experience? It’s trust. It’s trust in the expertise, the experience, the brand. If you’re asking a chef to curate your meal, you’re putting your dinner in his hands, every bite. You’re trusting him to provide the experience you want, without you needing to micromanage the choices. Same is true when you ask a bookseller’s recommendation, a fishing guide’s best holes in a trout stream, a sommelier’s favorite bottle of Margaux in a Michelin-starred restaurant.”

  Click, click, click: streams and mountains and bottles of wine.

  “This is what Travelers has been providing discerning tourists since its inception: curated travel experiences. Yes, the delivery mechanisms have changed. But the content has not changed. The brand has not changed. The trust, it hasn’t changed.”

  Click: the current issue’s cover.

  “We are Travelers, ladies and gentlemen. The most trusted brand in international travel.”

  STOCKHOLM

  The American who calls himself Joe wakes up early, as always, an unbreakable lifetime habit. He brushes his teeth, washes his face, dries off with a thin, worn hand towel, its edges frayed. The dingy old towels came with the apartment, along with a few pieces of cheap furniture—not enough for forever, but a start—and a mop. The bathrooms are constant reminders that he’s abroad, the oddly shaped fixtures and inevitably cramped quarters and accordion shower doors, the smell of the grooming products, the hand-soaps and shaving creams and shampoos, they all smell like not-America.

  He ambles down the far side of the hill to Folkungagatan, the neighborhood’s main drag, with its hardware stores and photo labs, kebabs and pizza, supermarket and sushi bar and the cheerful little place with the surprisingly good curry.

  Joe buys a newspaper and steps into the bakery. Orders his pastry and coffee, looks around the small room, a normal-looking assortment of people, responding to his presence normally. His preferred seat, in the far corner, is free.

  He reads the newspaper in detail, eats carefully, drinks slowly. He has nothing to do today. He never has anything to do. For a half-century he worked all the time, even when it looked like he was on vacation. Then he needed to retire.

  First he went to Iceland, established a quiet life in the countryside. Then for variety he came here, to a familiar, comfortable Western European city. He likes Stockholm.

  Whenever the door opens, he glances up, but never lets his gaze linger. He ignores the television that’s playing twenty-four-hour international news, nearly all of it businessy, programming tailored to whatever breed of human wants to know the share price of Intel at any given moment. Certainly not him.

  A woman walks in who’s so tall and so beautiful that she’s impossible to ignore. She orders a cappuccino, then makes her way down the pastry display, considering her choices.

  His eyes flicker to the screen over her shoulder, a bit of nonfinancial news for a change, a breaking story: a murder victim has been discovered in Capri. The case has captured the attention of the international media—a luxury hotel in a famous place, a dead man stabbed in the neck and thrown off a cliff, a mystery woman wanted for questioning.

  The American tries to focus on the low-volume audio, catches only flickers. His hearing has been deteriorating, along with everything else. He’s getting old, and it’s coming on quickly. For a long time he felt invincible, impressed by his own resilience and stamina. Not anymore.

  He stands, walks toward the TV, no longer paying any attention to the blonde.

  “The victim is apparently a citizen of the United States but not a resident,” the reporter says from her stand-up spot, the sea shimmering behind her. Then the screen splits to include a new image, a headshot.

  “Holy crap,” Joe mutters, frozen there in the
middle of the bakery, blocking the path of the Amazonian Swede.

  “Taylor Lindhurst’s last known address was in a remote region of southwest France.”

  Although it’s remotely possible that Lindhurst—a new name for an old acquaintance—was murdered by any number of rational people, for a variety of justifiable reasons, the most simple explanation is the likeliest.

  Perhaps Joe should get out of here today. Pack a bag, walk across the Slussen cloverleaf across Gamla Stan and over to the station for a train to the airport, a flight back to Iceland. Or maybe instead he should get to the Värtahamnen terminal right now, to hell with luggage, board one of those overnight vomitoria boats across the Baltic, hide out in Latvia or Estonia, places no one would think to look for him, and no one who tried would succeed.

  He made the choice to believe that he’d be safe here in Iceland and Sweden until the end of his life, either because he’d die a natural death or because they’d find him, and he’d never even hear the bullet. Which he manages to convince himself, even in the small hours, would be preferable.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Will steps out onto Sixth Avenue, in the middle of Midtown, the middle of the media world, Time Life and McGraw-Hill, Sirius and Fox, CBS and S&S, conglomerates strewn around the skyscrapers, the homogeneous anonymity of midcentury institutional architecture, flapping flags and sputtering fountains, massive modernist sculptures dwarfing the hot dog carts and honey-roasted nuts and all the tiny little people, scurrying around like ants, Will himself just another one, another little ant crossing the stone-paved plaza, glancing at the hundreds of faces that surround him, five-thirty on a weekday afternoon.

  He stops at the corner, the traffic rumbling by, taxis and limos, SUVs and Minis, trucks and buses, honking and sputtering and belching black clouds of noxious exhaust. He stands at the very edge of the curb, toes over the precipice, dangerously exposed out there. Will can feel the crowd amassing behind him, who knows how many people, but he shouldn’t turn around to look.