The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  Allison is gone for the weekend, out in Bridgehampton with the children and their activities, their play dates, kids in swimming pools, moms in rosé. In a week all three of them will move out east for the duration of the summer, surfing camp and tennis lessons, benefits at the library and the museum, parties for the horse show and the celebrity softball game. Maybe her affair will wither in the neglect of the hot summer sun.

  This weekend, Malcolm begged off going east. “I’m sorry. I’ve fallen behind, and we’re closing on Wednesday.” He could see her suppress a giant shrug. The extent to which Allison gives a shit is limited to the minuscule embarrassment of her husband’s absence from whoever’s catered dinner party is on Saturday night. Tonight.

  On the other hand, many in Allison’s crowd of Hamptons housewives basically compete about their husbands’ relative importance. Weekends “trapped in the city” are offered as evidence of the man’s exalted position in the firmament—a deal closing, a trial. In the midst of all the standard-issue Wall Street, Malcolm knows that Allison relishes being able to say, “He has to close an issue,” accruing a certain social currency via her husband’s marginally creative career. It’s what she has instead of actual currency.

  Malcolm wonders if this is part of what’s bothering his wife: their relative lack of money. Money is nothing if not relative.

  The idea of solvency reminds him to call Will; Malcolm has to get to the bottom of that. No answer. “Hey Rhodes, I’m in town this weekend, want to get a drink? Call me back.”

  Malcolm surveys the massive complex of baseball diamonds and soccer fields, small portable grills and big orange coolers, taco trucks and shaved-ice carts, toddlers running around shrieking, red-faced middle-aged men leaning against chain-link fences clutching tallboys wrapped in crinkled brown bags, and everywhere the sounds of games, referee whistles and the cracks of bats, the groans of teammates and the cheers of spectators, and grown men in brightly colored soccer shorts and dingy dirty baseball pants, and nowhere in these fifty acres—in the geographical center of the most populous English-speaking city in the world—is anyone speaking a word of English.

  PROVIDENCE

  When the train pulls out of the station, the wi-fi connection revives itself, solid arcs on her laptop’s icon, and Chloe is able to complete her purchase, a round-trip ticket to Punta Cana, sugar-sand beaches and bath-temperature seawater, towering palms and frozen cocktails. It’s an unlikely destination for midsummer travelers from the American Northeast, so the plane tickets and hotel room are inexpensive.

  She types in her Trusted Traveler number, her passport number, her telephone number. When it comes to her emergency contact, she automatically starts to type Will’s mobile number, then pauses, her fingers hovering—

  No. She backspaces to the beginning.

  FALLS CHURCH

  As it turns out, Raji’s health insurance isn’t nearly as ironclad as he’d been led to believe. The HMO is now asserting that Raji’s heart problem is a preexisting condition, which of course is true. But isn’t nearly everything, in some way, a preexisting condition?

  So Raji is now working for his thirteenth straight day, trying to amass overtime, to pay for the procedure. It has been easier to get OT approved since his watch list was winnowed down, with a vastly increased level of thoroughness. It’s a lot of work, at all hours, every day.

  And this particular woman? She began her day very early, entering the New York City subway system via a MetroCard that she’d purchased a week earlier using an American Express card. Twenty-one minutes later, at Pennsylvania Station, she purchased a one-way Amtrak ticket to Portland, Maine. Aboard the train, she registered her computer with the wi-fi provider, then bought a plane ticket for a few days in the future, which are the details that Raji enters now:

  U.S. passport number: 10414962

  Flight: 83 BOS to GUA

  Ticket category: D2

  Seat: 39D

  Alert code: 2

  Raji pulls up this woman’s image on the screen. He remembers her from when he first started working here, tracking untrusted travelers, a couple of years ago. This woman used to travel a lot more, all over the world. But then she cut back dramatically, just a couple of international trips in the past year. Raji wondered what had happened to her, if she was okay. He’s relieved to see her on the move again.

  She books a room at an all-inclusive resort. The hotel takes care of airport transfers, so Raji doesn’t expect that she’ll book ground transportation, and she probably won’t rent a car. For some trips, there can be a lot of reservations, a lot of deposits, a lot of prepaid—

  Raji suddenly realizes something strange about her previous international trip. He does a quick search to confirm, then sits there staring at his screen, trying to figure it out.

  He exits his cubicle. Halfway to Brock’s office, he pauses, thinking through again, reconsidering, but this time from another viewpoint: what’s in it for him? Why should he go out of his way, above and beyond the call? Open himself up to being wrong? To criticism? Or conversely to pressure, to a rush, to anxiety? Why? He has plenty of other problems.

  He stands in the taupe corridor, surrounded by all this blandness, all these bland people doing all this bland work, his bland life. He turns back to his bland cubicle. To hell with them, he thinks. To hell with this.

  Then he changes his mind again. He doesn’t have it in him to shirk responsibilities, even if no one gives a damn.

  “Boss?” He raps on the door, soft knuckles.

  Brock looks up, a scowl, interrupted from doing whatever the hell Brock does in here, which everyone suspects is watch porn, all day, every day.

  “What’s up, Raj-man?”

  “I think I found something.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Stonely takes a few handfuls of ice cubes from the beer cooler. He puts the ice into a plastic deli bag, cinches a knot. He swings the bag against the fencepost, and again, a third time, crushing the ice, while glancing beyond the chain-link fence, taking a mental inventory of teammates, opponents, friends who are about to see him interact with this dude whom it’s impossible not to notice.

  He presses this icepack against his aching misshapen finger, which he broke halfway through his second year at Triple-A, the season when he had his best shot, but not if he sat on the DL for two months. He’d known immediately that this finger was broken. But he refused to admit it, and just kind of hoped the finger would heal itself. It didn’t, of course. So when he eventually owned up to it, people started calling him Stonely, based on this ridiculous lie, this bogus macho, when it was really just fear and denial, aka being a pussy, which is the opposite of being hard as a stone-faced killer.

  When the following season ended, riding the bus back from Toledo, he knelt beside Coach, sitting at the front, surrounded by paperwork. “Hey skip, I was wondering if you’d write me a recommendation letter?”

  After a long-ass Greyhound-bus ride—from Louisville through Cincinnati and Columbus and Philly, twenty hours—and a few weeks of looking, he landed a temp job in a mailroom, then started taking computer classes. He got promoted, and promoted again. That was thirteen years ago.

  “Hey boss. You came out to Brooklyn ’cause you need baseball but the Yanks are in Baltimore and you hate the Mets?”

  Malcolm’s smile is the sort of a guy about to deliver bad news.

  “You remember last year, Stonely, I asked you to take care of that thing?”

  Stonely looks down at his dirty pants, his spikes, the mangy grass. There’s a cigarette butt down there, and a crushed piece of plastic that might be the cap to a crack vial. “Sure. How could I forget.”

  “Well, I need you to do that again. Same type of thing.”

  Stonely looks Malcolm Somers in the eye. He doesn’t like being a brown-skinned dude being hired by a white-skinned dude to commit a crime. But Stonely needs this job, and Malcolm is the one who keeps him in it, and Stonely likes Malcolm. Plus he could use the extra money.
So of course he’s going to do it. But still, he doesn’t have to like it. That’s what makes it a job. “Who is it?”

  “Some asshole who’s fucking my wife.”

  Stonely can’t hide the look of surprise. “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “You sure this is a good idea, boss?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s not. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

  Stonely doesn’t want this. But although Malcolm has a choice, now that Malcolm has made it, Stonely really doesn’t. “When?”

  “As soon as you can manage.”

  BOSTON

  When the train pulls out of the station, her phone starts to ring again, or rather to vibrate, illuminated, an insistent plea for attention. Will is calling again.

  Chloe hits Ignore again. She doesn’t want to talk to her husband, to listen to him beg, Please believe me, it’s the truth, please.

  Chloe is furious, and she doesn’t want to talk to anyone, not until she figures out exactly what she’s going to do about it. Her options are limited.

  She doesn’t want to be reachable, doesn’t want to be findable, and that’s not so easy. It was only fifteen years ago when people used to go on vacations and weren’t heard from for a week or two, in Guatemala or Tanzania or New Zealand, or not even so exotic, just a weeklong rental in Rehoboth, camping in the Poconos. They didn’t post pictures on social media, they didn’t answer calls or emails or text messages. Vacation meant you were just not around. Perhaps you were missed or needed or wanted, perhaps not, but either way, everyone dealt with it.

  Chloe rises from her seat, walks down the aisle, holding seatbacks for balance, the train rocking back and forth, hurtling into New Hampshire. She slides the restroom door open, bolts the lock. Her phone rings again, Malcolm this time, that shit-heel.

  They had a deal, and it was straightforward: Chloe would leave the staff, and would instead take responsibility for the important freelance work that Travelers needed—probably just one or two assignments per year, but done carefully, perfectly. In return, Malcolm would leave Will completely out of it. This deal was struck in a conversation that wasn’t opaque, not open to interpretation or misunderstanding. Chloe had made sure of that.

  She had been given only one assignment so far. It had been the most difficult thing she’d ever done in her life, by far. But she’d done it well. She was living up to her end. Malcolm obviously wasn’t.

  She drops her vibrating phone to the floor, and raises her foot to stomp on it, to stop the harassment. She’s going to hammer the SIM card with the cracked-up phone, then throw all the little bits of plastic off the train, one by one.

  But no. She may very well need this phone. So instead of destroying it, she’ll do what Will did when Chloe was following him to his illicit meeting. She kneels down and picks up this lifeline, this tracking device we all carry with us, wherever we go. She disables it.

  FALLS CHURCH

  “Here is what is odd,” Raji says. “This woman, this Chloe Rhodes, she took a taxi to the New York airport, which she paid for with a credit card. She checked into her flight—no bags—then used this same plastic in the airport to buy stuff. Look.”

  Brock leans forward, plants his palm on Raji’s desk, flexing the muscles on his forearm, sending the SEMPER FI tattoo into ripples. Brock never misses an opportunity to flex his muscles, nor to remind people that he was a marine.

  Raji plays two video clips of surveillance footage from two different airport-security cameras, a woman buying a boxed salad and a drink from one vendor, then chewing gum and a couple of magazines from another.

  “And here she is, boarding.” From a third camera, the woman hands a pass to a gate agent, then disappears down a gangway.

  “Here she is at the other end, at immigration.” Click. “And exiting the terminal.”

  “She’s hot.”

  “Yes. There are two strange things about this trip. First, when she boarded the return flight to New York, she didn’t reenter this terminal.”

  There’s a pause while Brock considers what Raji means. “You sure?”

  “Not one hundred percent, but yes. So she must’ve returned to the terminal via another flight, from somewhere else. I still haven’t found any footage of her deplaning another flight, and her name doesn’t appear on any other manifests, but I’ll continue to look. She must have returned to the terminal somehow, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She flew all the way to Europe for a few days, and took another round-trip flight somewhere else. That’s a tremendous amount of flying.”

  “You’re right about that, Raj-man.”

  “And the second strange thing is this: she doesn’t use that credit card anywhere nearby—not in Turkey, not in Greece, not in Bulgaria. What’s even stranger, she doesn’t use any other card. She’s over there for three days, getting on some other flight, and she doesn’t swipe any bank card, anywhere. Not once.”

  “Huh.”

  “Not for a taxi, not a hotel, not a restaurant. She begins this trip using a credit card in New York, but then doesn’t use plastic for a single purchase of any sort. She also doesn’t use any bank card—or at least none I’ve been able to ID—to withdraw any cash.”

  “Is it possible that she went over there holding sufficient Turkish, um…”

  “Lira.”

  “…lira to keep her alive for three days?”

  “Sure, that’s possible. But wouldn’t it be very strange?”

  “I guess so. Do you have a theory, Raj-man?”

  “Yes. Either someone else was paying for everything she did, while she was there.”

  “That’s plausible. Or?”

  “Or her destination was not Istanbul.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Sunday night, Will is still alone, hoping to not be, expecting that Chloe will come home in time to go to work tomorrow. She’s not the type who calls in sick, and he doesn’t think she’s willing to be a no-show. So she’ll be back. Tonight.

  When Will was single, he hated Sunday nights. On weeknights he never felt bad being alone—going to sleep alone, waking up alone, that felt like part of work, part of his work ethic. And then Fridays and Saturdays, there’d be parties, or dates. But Sunday mornings he’d usually wake up alone, tired, possibly hungover. He’d sometimes spend the entire day alone, taking care of errands, laundry, groceries, cleaning, exercising. By bedtime he’d be depressed. Which he is now.

  He should get out of here, this broken home of his. He should go get a drink, is what he should do. And he should do it at Ebbets Field.

  Then another idea occurs to him, something else he can look for at Dean’s bar.

  —

  Dean is in a conspiratorial huddle with the bartender, their heads inches apart, when he notices Will. “Mr. William Rhodes, always a pleasure. Please have a seat. How’s that hot wife of yours?”

  “I’m not bad. She’s, um, she’s not bad either.”

  “I’ve been wondering, Will, what’s up with Gabriella Rivera?”

  “Not sure what you’re asking.”

  “Did you ever, y’know…”

  “Uh, no.”

  “What’s her story? She single?”

  “She’s a widow, Dean. Remember Terry Sanders? That was her husband.”

  “Oh shit, really?”

  “Really. But listen, Dean, can I ask a favor?”

  Dean has always been widely known as a man who can procure all sorts of things while daring the world to either catch him or reward him. Mostly it has been the latter.

  “Always.”

  Will looks around, assessing their privacy. Marlon the ultraserious barkeep is at the far end, in deep conversation with a shady-looking character. No one else is in earshot, not above the background music.

  “This is going to sound strange.”

  “Already does.”

  “I’d like to buy a fake passport.”

  Dean smiles broadly. “What are you up to, Wi
ll Rhodes?”

  “This is just an insurance policy.”

  “Insurance? Against what?”

  “What’s insurance ever against, Dean? Bad things happening.”

  —

  The following night Will finds himself in another bar, a divier bar, in a dicier neighborhood, fewer brownstone townhouses and more mechanics’ garages, less reliable access to taxis, to fresh produce, to responsive police. He shakes hands with a toothpick-wielding guy who takes his rock-and-roll cred very seriously, painted-on black jeans and Doc Martens, tats and piercings and studded leather jacket, a Ramones tee shirt. It’s always the Ramones. Except when it’s the Clash.

  “It’s five thousand for Canadian, ten thousand for American.”

  “Okay,” Will says, “I’ll take the Canadian.”

  The toothpick dances around. “Yeah, Canadian’s good for getting out of the States. Might be a problem getting back in, though.”

  Maybe, but that wouldn’t be Will’s problem. He’d be coming back under his own name, or he wouldn’t be coming back at all. He looks down at the Canadian passport, turns the pages, fingers the paper, examines the details. The name is Douglas Davis.

  “Who’s this?”

  “You care?”

  “Not in an existential way. But in a practical way, yeah.”

  “Some meth-head who lives near Hamilton, Ontario. Sold this with the guarantee that he wouldn’t report it missing till, um”—the guy checks a notebook—“next April.”

  “What if he reports it earlier?”

  “Then I’ll tell the guy I bought it from, and he’ll go break the motherfucker’s legs.”