The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  The envelope that’s already in Stonely’s hand contains a small stack of cash and a Post-it with an address. Stonely lets the envelope slide into the space between his thigh and the man’s.

  The subway stops.

  The man rises, the envelope now in his hand, and leaves.

  The train starts to move again, and Stonely catches a glimpse of the guy, walking toward the exit at the end of the platform. They catch each other’s eyes before Stonely’s car gets sucked into the dark tunnel, speeding him toward his home and family.

  —

  “Chloe? You here?”

  Even though Will has arrived home two hours later than expected, Chloe appears to be out. He breathes a sigh of relief.

  How awful. Has it really come to this? He’s happy that his wife isn’t home?

  He hustles upstairs to his office, gropes in the dark for the pull to the bare bulb that’s hanging from the rosette in the middle of the room. Will has identified fourteen spots in this house where he intends to install new light fixtures—chandeliers and sconces, a wall-mounted swing-arm here in this room, to illuminate the desk. A junction box is exposed in a cutout of the plaster wall, at the spot where that lamp will eventually be installed. But the lamp is an item that Will would rank somewhere between two hundred and three hundred on a list of punch-list priorities, if he were willing to undergo the painful process of enumerating the unfinished jobs, and ranking their importance, an exercise that would thrust him into a pit of utter despair. So he doesn’t do it.

  Will pulls a shoebox from a high shelf, removes the lid. The box is filled with vintage hotel labels collected at flea markets in Bruges and Singapore, Sharm al-Sheikh and Rio de Janeiro. One day they will all be framed, hung from walls yet unpainted, another of his theoretical projects, awaiting their abstract perfections.

  He removes the labels, careful with the thin waxy bags and glassine coverings, and sets the stack aside. He picks up a letter opener. He hears the door close downstairs.

  “Chloe?”

  “Hi!”

  He hurries now, using the letter opener to pry up the false bottom of the shoebox. He can hear Chloe’s bag drop on the foyer floor, thud. Her feet clacking on the parquet.

  Will reaches into his jacket, and removes the envelope with his latest payment, adds it to the rest of his secret trove, a few piles of hundred-dollar bills.

  Chloe is trudging up the stairs, one loud step at a time.

  Will is having trouble replacing the false bottom, his hands shaking.

  He hears Chloe arrive at the top of the stairs, and now she’s walking down the hall. He tosses the glassine bags back into the box, but he’s not going to make it, he’s not going to have time to get this straightened out before she walks in the door.

  “Hey,” she says.

  Will’s back is to the door. He turns. “Hi,” he says, walking to greet her, mostly to prevent her from entering the room, seeing what he’s doing.

  “What are—?”

  He kisses her on the mouth, breathing in her question, swallowing it. He wraps his arms around his wife, tightly. Squeezes.

  Then he asks, “How was Washington?”

  “Bureaucratic. How was Spain?”

  What can Will tell her about Spain? “It was fine. Except when I was throwing up.”

  “Right. Sorry. What was it? Food poisoning?”

  “I guess.”

  Did she just look over his shoulder, to see what he’d been doing?

  “But I haven’t seen my wife in more than a week, and believe it or not”—he drops one of his hands down, below the small of her back—“talk of vomit is not what I missed about her.” With his other hand he takes Chloe’s, and leads her away from his half-hidden secrets.

  It’s only a dozen feet to their bedroom door, just a couple of seconds of furious calculating for him to come to the conclusion that he’ll have to feign extra-urgent desire here, he’ll have to pretend that he simply cannot control himself, he needs to be on top the whole time, despite Chloe’s preference. Today he’ll have to be selfish. Because he needs to be the first to get up from the bed after sex, so he can return to the office before she has the chance.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Another day has slipped away, and here it is nine-thirty, and Malcolm has never gotten around to calling his wife and kids, never had the chance to do half the things he thought he’d do, including check the security footage, which he should do every other day at the least, but now it’s been nearly a week, and tomorrow isn’t going to get less busy, so, fuck it, he’ll do it now. It’s too late anyway to score points for coming home; the kids are already asleep. He might as well try to bank whatever he can for being a workaholic.

  Malcolm walks down the hall, nearing the predictably occupied office of the man whose nameplate says VITO PARNELL but whom everyone calls Veal Parmesan, a play on not only his name and his profession but also on his long-ago mistake of admitting that he loved the Italian-American breaded cutlet.

  Vito is a food writer from back before food writing was fashionable, as well as the director of the test kitchen. Vito is a legend, well known throughout the industry for meticulous prose and exacting research, and famous in this building for his snail-like velocity. There is no piece of text, no matter how short and trivial, that Vito can dispatch quickly. He arrives at the office early and departs late.

  “Veal,” Malcolm says from the doorway, not quite stopped. No one who’s still in the office at this hour wants to chitchat.

  “Malcolm.”

  At the end of the hall, the boss shuts his office door behind him, locks it. He doesn’t turn on the overheads. There’s plenty of light streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows that face the Avenue of the Americas, shining from the buildings across the avenue whose own windows present something like a performance-art exhibit of lonely late-night labor, aproned cleaning ladies pushing vacuum cleaners, and jumpsuited maintenance men on ladders, and bankers at desks with sentient-looking Equipoise lamps, takeout containers and partially crumpled cans of Diet Coke that didn’t quite make it to the trash bin, all of it a silent pantomime of isolation and alienation.

  Malcolm unlocks the clandestine inner sanctum. He takes a seat at the small metal desk, opens the laptop. He accesses the folders for the compressed video files, and opens the first one, Monday’s. He doesn’t as a rule check the weekend footage.

  He waits a few seconds for the file to decompress, then the video starts to play. It’s a static view of his guest room–cum–home office, captured from a lens that sits in an air vent in the crown molding, aimed at his desk, motion-activated.

  Nearly all the motion is his wife, walking back and forth across the carpeted room, tending to a basket of laundry, yanking open curtains, tidying throw pillows. Late in the day he sees himself sitting at the desk, opening the computer, then a minute later closing it, lights out. That’s Monday.

  Tuesday is not different in any meaningful way, except that for ten minutes Allison lies on the sofa, talking on the phone. After the call ends she continues to lie there doing nothing for a minute, staring into space, smiling. Malcolm wonders if she is smoking weed again.

  Viewed in fast-forward, eliding the nonmoving unoccupied bits, it’s clear that this room is barely used, like an impulse purchase at a sample sale, whoops, we didn’t really need that.

  Nothing on Wednesday until Allison enters the room at midday, crosses it, the images racing along, skipping most of the frames, which is why it takes Malcolm a moment to process what he’s seeing.

  Fuck. Did he really just see what he thinks he saw?

  He returns this video segment back to the beginning, the door opening. His wife enters. She is tugging on a hand, whose attached arm enters the frame, followed by the rest of the person, a man. Malcolm hits Pause to examine him, completely 100 percent unfamiliar. Who is this guy?

  Malcolm hits Play. The two people walk to the sofa, where they undress urgently, frantically grabbing body parts, to
ssing aside clothing, belt unbuckling, panties unfurling, garments hitting the carpet one after another, a hailstorm.

  Allison lies back on the furniture while the man grabs her calves, hoists them in the air, opens her legs. He falls to his knees on the floor, and his face disappears between her thighs. The top half of her body is out of the camera frame, which was installed to monitor the desk, and the safe. Not the sofa.

  Then the man stands, starkly naked, disturbingly erect.

  Allison brings herself to a seat at the edge of the sofa, leans down, opens her mouth. Her tongue works up and down, then her head bobs while the man strokes her hair, her ears.

  Malcolm has seen pornography before, of course he has, but he’s never seen anything like this, real. And it’s his goddamned wife.

  She unmouths the guy, moves her face away, says something—thankfully there’s no audio to accompany this video, Malcolm isn’t sure he could stand sound—and lies down again, on her back again, and this man—who the fuck is this man?—climbs on top of her.

  Malcolm increases the fast-forward speed, the images once again herky-jerky, less graphic because of all the skipped frames. The two characters in this film shift positions—she gets on top, then climbs off, turns around, presents her rear in the air, creating an unfortunate view of this other man’s ass as he stands on the floor, fucking Malcolm’s wife doggy-style at 11:48 on a Wednesday morning. This morning.

  Finally the two decouple, re-dress, retreat from the room, the whole disrobing episode replaying in reverse, until the screen appears to freeze, a view on an unoccupied room, then cuts to nothingness. The next scene is a half-hour later, Allison alone, looking for something, then locating it, something small on the sofa, an earring that she reinserts in her right ear.

  Come to think of it, Malcolm didn’t notice any goddamned condom in that sex tape.

  He shuts the computer. He sits in the dim light, staring at the wall in front of him, the giant outdated map of the irrelevant world.

  This is hugely dispiriting. But now that the event has happened, it’s not shocking. His wife is, obviously, bored out of her skull. She is lonely. Malcolm isn’t surprised that she wants an adventure, and by definition her husband is not. But what is surprising is that she needs the adventure so much that she went out and found it, brought it home; that she’s so desperate for it she’s willing to do this, this forbidden thing.

  Malcolm realizes that there’s no longer any reason for him to be in the glum little windowless room, which doesn’t have a damn thing to do with his adulterous wife.

  But—oh shit, it suddenly occurs to him: what if it does?

  —

  Will is jolted awake, confused. “What’s that?”

  “Huh?”

  “Shhh.” Will is bolt upright in bed, head cocked. “I think there’s someone in the house,” he whispers.

  “What?”

  “Shhhhhh.”

  “Why? Shouldn’t we make noise? Like with bears?”

  Will looks over at his wife in the eerie half-light. Bears? Or maybe she’s right. Maybe the best course of action is to make the intruder aware of their presence.

  He gets out of bed.

  “What the fuck are you doing, Will? Don’t go out there.”

  Will looks around the room for a weapon. A pointy high-heeled shoe is the most dangerous thing he can see, and he’s not going to defend himself with a woman’s shoe. He steps into the hall, unarmed. Looks left, right. Tiptoes toward the stairs that lead to the parlor floor. Peers over the banister, trying to—

  “Hey!” he can hear Chloe scream, from the bedroom. Will turns just in time to see the man running directly at him—

  Will braces for impact as the man lowers his shoulder, slams into Will like a fullback trying to barrel over a cornerback. Will feels himself flying off his feet, tumbling head over foot down the stairs, tangled up in the legs of the intruder, who steps on one of Will’s hands, kicks him in the thigh, then vaults over Will, who’s sliding headfirst, bumping against the stairs, tailbone and shoulder and the back of his skull, and Will is still in the process of getting injured when he realizes he’s thankful he’s not getting shot, and he comes to a stop, in a crumpled heap of pain, halfway down the stairs, from where he can see the man running through the front hall, and grabbing a couple of bags as he dashes out the door.

  —

  Malcolm can hear Allison clattering around in the kitchen, doing God-only-knows-what at eleven at night. Probably nothing more culinary than avoiding going to bed with her husband; it must be horrifying to contemplate having sex with both your lover and your husband in the same day. Malcolm’s not sure how he and Allie are ever going to have sex again.

  He wishes he could’ve learned about the affair without the visual evidence. It’d be more like having a broken bone, something that will heal over time. But this is like a cancer, pain from within, no cure.

  Malcolm walks into the office, looks at the couch. At least Allison had the courtesy to keep it out of their bedroom. Or did she? Who knows? There’s no camera in the bedroom.

  She is still, loudly, in the kitchen.

  Malcolm opens the safe, removes a thumb drive. He types the password into the computer. Plugs in the little drive, and swaps out a half-dozen of the hard drive’s sensitive files with different versions of the same files from the stick, which he slips into his pocket. He’ll keep that on his person for a while, till he figures out what’s going on.

  And of course now there are other security measures he’ll need to take. He runs through the list in his mind, checking off items, a timeline. What a nightmare.

  Who is this man? Malcolm needs to find out. Then what? Malcolm isn’t going to kill this man for fucking his wife. But that doesn’t mean Malcolm isn’t going to kill this man.

  —

  “So this is it?” The policeman looks down at the list of items that were in the stolen bags, Will’s and Chloe’s. “Nothin’ from upstairs?”

  “No,” Will says, “it doesn’t look like it.”

  “And you say the intruder was on the third floor? Did you see him descend, ma’am?”

  “No. I saw him run past our bedroom. He could’ve been coming down from the third floor. Or he could’ve been in the home office.”

  “Home office? Whatcha got in there?”

  “Not much,” Will says. “The printer is the most valuable thing.”

  “What about paperwork? Files? Where do you keep your passports? The deed? You own this house?” The cop looks around with a frown, unimpressed. He has a thick outer-borough New York accent, the type of accent that Will remembers from his childhood visits to see his uncle in Brooklyn, the diction of cops and firefighters and plumbers and doormen, of certified public accountants and registered nurses, fourth-generation Irish and Italians and Poles and Germans, the Ellis Island crowd, plus blacks who migrated from the Deep South two or three generations ago, recolonizing the old European-immigrant neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn.

  This is what New York used to sound like, not very long ago, when the city was populated mostly by people whose parents and grandparents were born here. But now the city is filled with other sorts of immigrants and other American transplants, just like Will, who sounds like he could be from anywhere. This cop could only be from here. His partner too, who’s outside taking statements from neighbors.

  “The office is untouched,” Will says. He really doesn’t want anyone to start snooping around up there. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Oh yeah?” the cop asks.

  Chloe is looking on, observing the exchange. Maybe Will is overplaying his hand. “Pretty sure,” he says. “Our passports are definitely still there. But I didn’t do a complete inventory.”

  “You should,” the cop says, putting away his notebook. “You never know what people are after these days, what with identity theft, things like that.” He shrugs, the modern world, who can figure it out.

  “That’s a good point. I will.”
>
  “You’re lucky,” the cop says. “Very lucky. You know that?”

  —

  “Why did you do that?”

  They’re lying in bed on their backs, staring at the ceiling, still wired from the break-in, the police, the busyness of a crime scene, however petty. The cop’s ignorant assertion is still ringing in Will’s ears. Lucky?

  “Do what?”

  “Run after him, Will? You could have been killed. You’re not that type of man.”

  “Oh no? What type of man is that?”

  “The type who does something stupid, something that can get him killed.” She leans on her elbow, stares at him in the low light. Will wonders what she sees.

  “Were you really worried about what that guy could steal?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Then why? Were you worried about what I’d think if you didn’t do something? I hope not.”

  Why did he do that? What was he trying to protect? Was he worried about his stash of cash, his burner phone, the revelation of his secret life? That’s how people get caught in crime, in extramarital affairs: the freak unrelated accident that exposes everything.

  No, he realizes, that wasn’t it, not at all. What he was worried about was his wife.

  But now that he thinks about it: was this really a freak unrelated accident?

  NEW YORK CITY

  Chloe cuts her eyes away, dodging the question.

  “That bad?”

  “Noooo,” Chloe protests, but she doesn’t sound compelling, a trace of up-speak at the end of the drawn-out vowel, inserting a question there, self-asserting her own doubt to her own response.

  “Oh my God, Chlo, do you think Will is cheating on you?”

  It’s a good thing that Allie Somers will never rise to any position of power. Her first instinct, always, is to activate the nuclear warheads.

  Chloe had arrived at the same conclusion a lot slower, after months of vague suspicion. So on an evening when Will had mentioned a drinks date but didn’t specify with whom, Chloe decided to find out.

  She pulled her hair into a ponytail, tucked her head into a Mets cap, a freebie from some event a few years ago; she’s a Yankees fan. She wore sunglasses under the cap. It’s hard to distinguish anyone wearing glasses and a cap, an effective disguise that also has the benefit of being deniable. There’s no excuse for wearing a wig.