The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  He stays late, then steps out into the deserted street, a foreboding chill. A block or two away, tires screech. From another direction, a loud laugh, the threatening sort. Will hears a man shout and a dog bark, the same sounds of dangerous dark anywhere. He’s more aware of them than he used to be.

  He’s a couple of miles from his hotel, and he suspects he’s not going to find a taxi. Maybe he should return inside, ask the barkeep for a number. Maybe use his phone, try to solve the problem in the contemporary fashion.

  Will hitches up his pants, takes stock. Although he wouldn’t call himself drunk, he’s definitely not sober.

  A trio of young men round the corner, turn onto his street, and seem to notice him.

  Will is ready for this, he thinks. He’s been training, he’s in good shape. Maybe he’s even looking for it.

  NEW YORK CITY

  After the two days at the camp in Virginia, Will had come home with the very beginnings of fresh skill sets, both of which needed a lot of additional work. So the plan was to continue to run Will through his paces, practicing surveillance and countersurveillance on the streets of the city, early mornings and lunchtimes and the occasional fallow stretch of afternoon, following random passersby, rabbit moves and leapfrogging and route recon, observed closely by Elle and Roger, then debriefed in the secluded booths of greasy spoons and shot-and-a-beer bars.

  “What about firearms?” he asked Elle.

  “What about them?” She dipped a French fry into a gravy boat. Will had never witnessed anyone order fries with gravy on the side, a bowl of brown gloop with a ladle.

  “When will I get a gun?”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? I certainly hope you never get a gun. There are already far too many guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Almost all guns, in fact.”

  Will didn’t have a rational rebuttal at the ready. He didn’t disagree.

  “You don’t know how to use a pistol, do you? And you can’t take one abroad. So the only thing any type of firearm is going to get you is in trouble, or shot. If you really feel the need to accomplish either of those things, just let me know, I’ll take care of it for you.”

  Will let it drop.

  At lunchtime the next day, he practiced a surveillance-detection route, unsupervised, unmonitored, on his own. He headed west, in fits and starts and double-backs, through lobbies and tunnels and big crowds and empty stretches, out past the tall modernist office buildings, out past the theaters, out past the tenements, all the way to one of the last forlorn plots of Manhattan real estate, where a dilapidated warehouse loomed next to a chaotic taxi garage.

  A uniformed security guard sat in front of a tiny fan, dozing. Will walked past him, climbed two very long sets of steep steps. He pushed open a heavy steel door.

  A man was waiting in the big open space. The floors were covered in mats, the walls padded.

  “Hi, I’m Will.”

  The man extended his hand for a bone-crushing shake. “Frank.” He took Will’s measure without any pretense of hiding it. “So you wanna be trained in mixed martial arts, huh?”

  “That’s right.” Will had called earlier, from the communal phone in the archive room.

  “Okay.” Nodding, but not really in agreement. “Why?”

  “I want to be a little less bad at defending myself.”

  DUBLIN

  The pub is behind Will, fifty yards; the menacing trio is in front, seventy-five. Will still has the option of turning around, fleeing back into the safety of the crowd, tail between legs. But maybe the pub is where the young men are going. Or even if not, maybe they’ll follow him in, smelling his fear, tasting his blood.

  No. He won’t back down, not from this.

  He walks toward them, muscles tensing, senses sharpened. He smells their cigarette smoke wafting on the wind, hears a cough. He looks at the cougher, just a kid really, skinny and pimply, and he realizes they’re all kids, teenagers or even tweens, nervous, maybe they snuck out with stolen cigarettes, trying it out, coughing, giggling, worried about getting caught.

  “Good evening, sir,” one says when they pass, giving Will ample berth, a grown man emerging from a pub, late at night on a dark street.

  Will had misunderstood. They’re afraid of him.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Gabriella sets off on a reverse immigration from the Upper East Side, like The Jeffersons going back in time, leaving the de luxe apartment in the sky, an apartment that Terrance found by the happenstance of family connections, a short-term deal turned into a long-term steal, surrounded by all these upright citizens, their well-dressed kids and well-groomed dogs, not a choke-collared pit bull among them. The only other non-Caucasian in the building is a beautiful and always put-together dark-skinned African-American woman whom Gabriella thinks of as Black Barbie. It appears that Gabriella and Black Barbie have tacitly agreed to not be friends, not wanting to give the appearance of forming any sort of minority alliance.

  Over on the Lexington Avenue local, the crowd is mostly blacks and Hispanics coming down from Harlem and the Bronx. At Union Square Gabriella transfers to the L train in a swarm of the North Brooklyn crowd, the college-degreed kids, who all get off within a few stops, most of them immediately in Williamsburg but the younger, more tattooed ones in Bushwick.

  Then out past all the gentrification and pioneering, the subway rumbles through one slum after another, graffiti on the station walls, the stench of urine when the doors open, busted overhead lights, the ever present possibility of malevolence amid all this malignant neglect, where the real-estate stock is unredeemed and unredeemable—housing projects and six-story apartment buildings with trash-strewn concrete courtyards, abandoned buildings alongside empty lots filled with junk and junkies, police-cruiser lights flashing and engines revving as the sedans race between disaster and tragedy, cops getting out warily, hands on holsters.

  The voyage can last as long as ninety minutes door-to-door, longer to ride the subway to Canarsie than to fly to D.C. She brings a sheaf of reading material with her, usually the unmanageable pile of the Sunday Times, and she settles in.

  Her mother’s apartment—the apartment Gabriella and her sister grew up in—is the second floor of an aluminum-sided house with a brick stoop, one bathroom and two small bedrooms, the four of them living in nine hundred square feet for her entire childhood. Dinner is rice and beans, curried oxtail stew, a visit from her Grandmother Teresa with her diabetes and arthritis, also the onset of dementia, referring to Gabriella with a name to which she hasn’t answered in fifteen years.

  “Please Abuela,” she says, in her most patient voice, “call me Gabriella.”

  “But your name is Crystal.” A confused look on Teresa’s face, trying to understand.

  “Not anymore, Abuela.” She ditched that stripper name when she went to college, started using her middle name, her paternal grandmother’s. Gabriella shed her original skin layer by layer, first her name and then her clothes, her accent and her music, her attitude and her outlook, trying to stand out less dramatically from the other New York girls on campus.

  She boards the return subway at nine o’clock, the train car almost empty, not many people headed from the farthest reaches of Brooklyn into Manhattan on a Sunday night, just dark-skinned commuters on their way to shitty late-shift jobs wearing cheap denim and white sneakers, playing video games on phones, or staring into space.

  At Sutter Avenue, in the heart of East New York, trouble gets on the subway, wearing all the signifiers of a guy who thinks he’s tough, the undisguised stare, grabbing at his crotch, a predator.

  “ ’S’up.”

  In response Gabriella produces the smallest possible smile, not encouraging but not entirely dismissive. You can’t completely ignore guys like this, it only makes it worse.

  He takes a seat next to her, far too close. She can tell that a few other people notice this intrusion, but they’re all middle-aged or older, or women. No one here is going to help h
er.

  “Where you goin’?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “You fine, you know that?” He strokes her cheek with the backside of his hand.

  She slides across the bench. “Please don’t touch me.”

  “You too fine for me?” He reaches to her thigh, a stroke. Right there, she thinks, sexual assault.

  At the far end of the car, a woman stands, opens the door, and leaves, retreating to the relative safety of another car, a witness to nothing.

  Gabriella looks at this guy: yellow eyes, hooded lids, scar across the chin, tattoo of a Chinese character on the neck. She wonders if he’s armed. Anybody can get a gun these days, sometimes for as little as fifty bucks, less than half a pair of sneakers.

  “Did I invite you to touch me?” she asks. “I don’t think I did, Papi.” She has found that semi-thugs are often intimidated by the perceived thugness of other ethnicities. So with African-Americans she’ll accentuate her Hispanic heritage; with Latins she’ll pretend she’s black. “So please remove your hand from my leg.”

  He glowers at her, his hand still resting on her thigh.

  “You a big man, Papi?” She turns to face him head-on. “Sexually harassing women? On the subway? Tough guy?”

  He sucks his teeth.

  “Okay, tough guy. I’ll give you till the count of three.”

  “Yeah?” He sucks his teeth again. “Then what?”

  She doesn’t have any intention of counting to three. She shoots her right elbow up into the bottom of his jaw, can hear the teeth knocking together as she brings her left arm across her body, a wide hook that lands dead on his mouth, busting his lip, blood spattering across the window.

  “Crazy bitch!” He jumps up, and so does she, razor-focused on his body language, the position of his hands. If he has a weapon, she needs to see him reach for it before he even knows she’s noticing.

  But he doesn’t reach for anything except his bleeding face, staring at her in disbelief, completely unprepared for this, no idea how to respond.

  The train is slowing, coming into a station. Big drops of blood spatter onto the filthy floor.

  The doors opens.

  Gabriella can see him thinking about attacking her, charging her. He’s much taller. He’s pretty sure he can take her. But then again, she just fucked up his face very quickly, and if there’s one humiliation he doesn’t want, it’s to get beaten up on the subway by a woman.

  He stares at her, testing her resolve, perhaps his own. She doesn’t look away; after a couple of seconds, he does. He turns, walks out, onto the dimly lit empty platform.

  The doors close. The punk turns back to stare at her, sucks his teeth yet again, even in defeat unwilling to back down completely, too much pride for his own goddamned good. Lucky to still be alive. She’d considered killing him.

  The train starts to move.

  An old woman at the end of the car puts her hands together, clap, clap, clap, nodding at Gabriella. A couple of other people join as the train leaves the station, screeching around a curve, picking up speed.

  DUBLIN

  Will sits in his hotel lobby, highly polished Regency tables and gleaming brass lamps, taut silk upholstery with tasseled fringes. An American couple slouch on a camelback sofa, both turning the pages of competing guidebooks. Will notices these couples all the time, two people who don’t seem to have had a civil conversation in a decade, yet somehow manage to tough it out. Will can’t decide if it’s admirable or pathetic or both.

  He checks the time, does the math. Chloe is probably at work. He sends her a friendly anodyne text message, receives a quick response, nothing specific being communicated here, just the abstract desire—the commitment—to communicate.

  For a while they’d tried to talk daily when one or both were traveling. But it was usually more frustrating and inconvenient than anything, with time-zone differences and dead zones and spotty reception, not to mention the work they were doing abroad. So they agreed to text instead, each absolving the other of the responsibility of stepping away from working to take an errant call from an elusive spouse.

  Will looks up as a man struts into the sitting room, broad-shouldered and clean-shaven, wearing a capitalist-in-repose getup, suede loafers, pressed shirt with monogrammed cuffs, jeans with a woven belt. This must be Will’s contact, consulting his wristwatch, making sure everyone notices his jewelry, his impatience, his importance.

  “Excuse me,” Will says, “are you Shane Nicholson?”

  “Yes sir. You’re Will Rhodes?” Handshaking. “Pleasure to meet you.” Backslapping.

  They leave the hotel, Shane showering Will with bonhomie, two American men abroad, us against them, of course Shane has never much cared for New York, in fact distrusts big cities generally, no offense intended, and here they live in a palace in the suburbs, bought for next to nothing, you know what I mean, half-tempted to sell just to turn the profit, before prices collapse again which they’re bound to do within two years, tops, but then I’d have to find another place to live, and, well, I’m telling you, this house is big.

  Yes, Will thinks: my car, my life, my everything, all big, bigger than yours.

  They walk a few blocks, then down a few steps, through a door decorated with a tiny American flag on a tiny flagpole.

  Inside, televisions are on. It’s a cold rainy Sunday night in Dublin, but it’s a bright sunny midafternoon in the U.S.A., baseball season on satellite TV. Will is introduced around to the guys, a baker’s dozen of men in their late twenties to early fifties, middle and upper management, interchangeable widgety men who do abstract widgety things.

  “But these guys over here? The Irish?” Shane is asking with a sneer. “You talk to them about EBITA, about quality control? They look at you like you’re out of your friggin’ mind.” Shane takes a thoughtful sip of lager. “No one here knows how to run a business.”

  “No one?”

  “Well, not no one.” Retreating from the overwhelming ignorance of his slur, slightly. “But you know what I’m saying.” You’re saying you’re a jingoist ass, Will thinks, but keeps quiet. He’s not here to make enemies with guys who run outsourced data-processing centers.

  Will turns to Bryson from Atlanta, pink-faced and white-haired and blue-blazered, a hypertensive American flag. Bryson is an avid reader of presidential biographies; he enjoys sharing pithy anecdotes in boardrooms and bathrooms and barrooms like this one. “You know, when Rough and Ready was in the White House…”

  Bryson is another expert on everything, a man who sees life as a series of trades in expertise, that you are what you know—or can plausibly assert to know—about anything, shipping routes, the Dodgers’ pitching rotation, health-care premiums, grilling meat.

  Will listens to Bryson bloviate, rewards him with on-cue smiles and guffaws. Bryson is exactly the type of guy who’ll say something he shouldn’t.

  “So tell me,” Will says, letting his laugh die down from a notably unfunny joke about Danish women. “Which one of you expats here has the dirtiest secret?”

  Bryson recoils, taken aback, but not really, just making a show of it.

  “Anyone hiding anything ugly? Extramarital affair? Embezzlement? C’mon.” Will beckons the waiter. “I’ll buy another.” Cash on the bar, two simultaneous transactions.

  “Well, there’s this one gentleman”—everyone is a lady or a gentleman to Bryson, except his wife, who’s “the wife”—“comes here to watch football.” Bryson looks around conspiratorially, making sure they’re unobserved, while in fact drawing observation. “Doesn’t really talk to anyone, doesn’t say much about anything.”

  “Wow. What a scandal! Thanks for sharing, Bryson.”

  The guy chuckles into his beer, the condescending laugh of a man who knows that his companion is missing the point. He turns to face Will. “This guy?” Drawing out the moment for maximum impact. “We all think he’s in the witness-protection program.”

  STOCKHOLM

  The Ameri
can cinches the straps of his backpack, and sets off on foot in the bright light of midafternoon, early summer, into the alleys and cobblestones and ocher-tinted buildings of Gamla Stan, narrow streets rising and falling, hills and stairs, restaurants and cafés. He walks past the opera house and the royal palace and into downtown, which is any other downtown, public-transportation hubs and brutalist department stores and chewing-gum-blackened paving stones, H&Ms—the originals!—and kebab shops, pickpockets and bureaucrats and a hollow-eyed panhandler slumped on the sidewalk, shaking a paper cup. He wades through this close humanity, bodies and sweat, perfume and cigarettes, the stench of a derelict as she passes, at once pleading and predatory, a young woman who’s her parents’ worst nightmare.

  Joe removes himself from the scrum, walks past the hotels that line the promenade fronting the waterway, small ferries and water taxis and pleasure craft, broad avenues filled with joggers and strollers, café tables under giant umbrellas, awnings over windows, and always a constant sense of sky—of vistas opening out, hills and bluffs and green spaces, a view of water around every corner, and a view on every patch of grass of a young woman in a bikini, sunbathing and smoking a cigarette and drinking beer, all the things you’re not supposed to do, all at once, but that seems ludicrous to these girls, alarmist, when you’re young and beautiful, and life will go on forever.

  He buys a newspaper and takes an outdoor seat at a café. Blue-and-white streetcars are gliding by, Porsches and Volvos, bicycles and mopeds. Gucci and Vuitton are across the street, with their merchandise scattered about this terrace too, draped on the good-looking lunchtime crowd who are dressed as if for work but look more like actors who’ve just departed the stage set of an office, and this café is maybe the commissary. Or the continuation of the set.

  The American watches a man arrive who fits the description, says hello to another man, joins his table, beckons the waitress. She kisses him on the cheek, we’re all friends, but she’s the one carrying the tray of drinks, and he’s the one checking out her ass.