The Travelers

by Chris Pavone

  “Really? To do what, exactly?”

  “To tell them about the people he meets, the places he goes. The embassies, parties, politicians. To help identify recruitment candidates.”

  “I don’t know,” the man says. “I guess it’s…not impossible. When did this start?”

  “A few months ago.”

  “And he’s been receiving money?”

  “In cash. And signing receipts from someone he calls his C/O.”

  The man raises his eyebrows. “You have any idea who these people are?”

  Chloe takes out her phone, hands it to him. “I have a picture of the woman.”

  He glances down, furrows his brow, shakes his head. “Don’t know her. But text it to me. Then give me a few hours.”

  NEW YORK CITY

  Will stares at the little plastic dispenser, like a baby roulette wheel, albeit anti-baby, and explicitly not a game of chance, so more like the opposite of roulette. The days of the week, the different colored pills, the tinny rattle that Will hasn’t heard in the past year, not since they’ve been trying to get pregnant. Supposedly trying to get pregnant.

  His mind is reeling, grasping at different implications. Chloe would hardly be the first woman who pretended to be trying to conceive while at the same time taking steps to prevent it. Why? Is she having an affair? Is she using his deceits as an excuse? Is she planning to leave Will? For someone else? Has that in fact already happened?

  Is Chloe really in Maine? Will keeps calling, and Connie keeps telling him that Chloe is out, and Will has assumed that his wife simply doesn’t want to talk to him. But maybe Connie’s covering. Maybe Chloe is somewhere else, with another man. Maybe that’s why she has been so elusive, so evasive, for so long. Why she rarely answers his phone calls. Why she has been on such an aggressive exercise regimen: to look better naked, for someone else.

  Maybe the adultery he needed to worry about wasn’t his own. Maybe he has completely misunderstood the nature of the problem he’s facing.

  NEW YORK CITY

  Will’s phone rings, an unfamiliar number with a 718 area code. “Hello, this is Will Rhodes.”

  “Who?”

  “Will Rhodes. Who’s this?”

  “Hah?”

  “I’m Will Rhodes. Who are you?”

  “Can you speak up? I can’t hear you.”

  “My name is Will.” Loudly, slowly. “You called me. How can I help you?”

  “I’m Bernie Katz.”

  “Do we know each other?”

  “I’m the guy you contacted about the old magazines.”

  “Oh! Oh, thanks for getting back to me.”

  “So I got what you’re looking for.”

  “Travelers, May 1992 and November 1994 issues?”

  “Travelers, every issue.”

  “You’re positive you have May ’92? And November ’94?”

  “I got all of ’em.”

  “Super. How much are you asking for them?”

  “For all of ’em?”

  “No. For the one issue. I mean the two of them. Apiece.”

  “Ten?”

  “Ten dollars?”

  “No, ten thousand dollars.”

  Will is stunned.

  “I’m kidding. Yeah, ten dollars apiece. Plus shipping.”

  “Shipping? Can I just pick it up? I’m also in New York.”

  “Uh, how do you know where I am?”

  “Your area code.”

  “Oh, right…Sure. I’m in what you people now call Prospect Heights.”

  “You people?”

  The guy doesn’t respond. But Will doesn’t want to pick a fight with him. “I can be there in thirty minutes.” Then Will hears cackling through the phone. “What’s so funny?”

  “I’m eighty-one years old…” More laughter. “And this is the first time in my life…I’ve ever found myself…in a back-issue…emergency.”

  —

  Stonely watches the woman he knows as Ray walk toward the target, teetering on high heels. She glances at the man a couple of times as they approach each other, fleeting eye contact, meant to distract him, put him off-guard, plus make him more likely to stop, when they’re five feet apart, and this happens: she stumbles, hits the pavement.

  “Oh my God.” The man kneels in front of her, a gentleman. “You okay?”

  That’s when Alonso, who was just a few steps behind the target for the past block, sinks the needle into the guy’s shoulder. The target collapses.

  Stonely pulls the truck to a halt right next to them, remains at the wheel while Julio hops out of the back. Three people drag the target into the truck, then climb in themselves, bind the guy’s hands with the same sort of plastic ties that the police now use for handcuffs, pull a pillowcase over his eyes.

  “We good?” Stonely asks. Even though he wasn’t out there on the sidewalk, still his heart is racing like crazy. He looks in the rearview and side-view mirrors, can’t see any sign of anyone who could’ve noticed anything.

  Everyone grunts. Everyone except the target, who will remain unconscious until he’s dragged out of the truck again, and deposited in a fortified room in a dank basement seven miles away, in another universe. The guy’s old universe no longer exists.

  —

  It’s a particular type of New York apartment building, a sunken lobby between two wings, dueling elevators, a neglected courtyard, cantilevered fire escapes, marble floors and plaster walls and ornate moldings, everything down-at-the-heels, chipped stone and cracked glass, wires in the porthole windows of the elevator, which is so slow that Will almost can’t believe it’s moving at all, a control panel with round Bakelite buttons and brass switches, a mechanical door that groans open, then you have to push a secondary safety door into the hallway that smells of boiled cabbage, the A and B lines in the front and C in the middle and D and E in the back, every toilet a powerful flushometer that makes you imagine the waste being sucked directly into outer space via pneumatic tube, nearly every doorway adorned with a mezuzah, even if the current occupants aren’t Jewish, because once they were, and who the hell goes through the trouble of removing these things from the jambs?

  Will rings the doorbell, Katz. He waits, then rings again.

  “I’m comin’,” he hears from inside. “Hold your horses, I’m comin’. Who’s there?”

  “It’s Will Rhodes.”

  No response.

  “The guy about the magazines?”

  “Oh.” The door opens. “Come on in.”

  The corridor is long and dark, and at the end is a living room that’s an explosion of clutter, magazines and papers and books everywhere, some of the piles reinforced with vertically arranged three-quarter-inch planks, perhaps decommissioned shelving turned on end, and art-glass vases and framed drawings and stretched canvases and organic sculptures, musty rugs, the lingering aroma of pipe tobacco layered atop the fresh scent of takeout-Chinese garlic with undertones of litter box. This is the type of room Will has nightmares about.

  “Wow.” Will turns his attention more carefully to the piles of magazines, which he sees also include the more traditional horizontal shelving as well as vertical stacks. “Why do you have all these?”

  “I’m a buff! I worked in the magazine business fifty years.”

  “Fifty?”

  “Well, forty-eight.”

  “What did you do, Mr. Katz? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  “What didn’t I do? Proofreading, layouts, photo editing, ad sales, you name it. I was even a managing editor! Believe you me, that was a shitty job. But eventually they shuffled me into a back room where I could just collect paychecks without breaking anything.” The guy shrugs. “It wasn’t so bad. Then they gave me a fancy watch, said good-bye, good luck.”

  “Is that the watch?”

  “This? Nah. What they gave me was a Rolex, but I’m not a Rolex kinda guy. A watch says something, doesn’t it? This thing you wear every day, whatever else you’re wearing. It’s like a pa
rt of you, it says something about you. I wanted something more, uh, understated.” The old man holds out his wrist, shows Will his timepiece, International Watch Company. Will has always been purposefully ignorant of watches, their levels of prestige. He buys old watches, in foreign places, inexpensively. But even he knows that IWC is expensive.

  Will’s senses are becoming more acclimated to the clutter, and details begin to emerge. The Heywood-Wakefield furniture, the original oil paintings and charcoal drawings, the Blondie concert poster that appears to be signed, in lipstick, by Debbie Harry.

  The expensive watch casts everything in a different light. This man is not poor; this man is messy, eccentric.

  “So the magazines?”

  “Right!” He shuffles across the room, over to an upright piano that Will hadn’t even noticed was there, pushed against built-in bookshelves. It takes Katz a good minute, but he finally locates both issues, double-checks the dates on the covers against the dates on the spines. Hands the two magazines over to Will, who in turn hands over a twenty.

  “Does this break up your complete set?”

  “Yeah, I guess it does.”

  “Why are you selling them?”

  The guy holds up the bill, snaps it.

  “Come on. Why are you really selling?”

  Katz looks Will in the eye. “I been in this apartment since 1973. Rent-stabilized. I raised two kids in this apartment. My wife, she died in this apartment.” He looks around at the accumulated possessions of a life. “The building’s been sold. We’re all getting kicked out. I’m never going to be able to afford anything bigger than a studio, and that studio’s gonna be in, I don’t know, Queens. If I’m lucky. So all this”—he sweeps his arm across his life—“has to go. I’d rather sell my things to people who want them than just put it all out on the sidewalk, to be picked up by scavengers.”

  Will thinks of the barstool he found on the street. Is he one of the scavengers?

  “You wanna buy anything else? It’s all for sale.”

  Will shakes his head. “Truth is I’m broke.”

  “Ha! Then you shouldn’t go around buying old magazines from old men. Here.” He thrusts the twenty back at Will. “Use it to buy some flowers for your wife. That’s the only thing that really matters.”

  Will doesn’t accept the money, so Katz shoves the bill into Will’s breast pocket, crushing his pocket square.

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Katz.”

  “Forget about it.” They walk down the dark hall, the parquet creaking.

  Will presses the elevator button, waits while the mechanics groan. He wonders where he should go sit while he scours those magazines, looking for the reasons they have been redacted. He glances at his watch, this obscure antique thing that he bought in Germany, and wonders what the watch says about him, what he hopes this accessory projects, the old man’s words sinking in, but something else distracting him…

  Another wristwatch…

  —

  “You again? What, you want some old Vanity Fairs now?”

  Will shakes his head.

  “Or I got a record player used to be owned by George Plimpton?”

  “Mr. Katz, do you know a lot about watches?”

  “A lot? I wouldn’t go that far.” The old man shrugs. “I know more than nothing.”

  “Can I show you something? I’d like to draw it.”

  Katz pulls the door open, and shuffles back to his cluttered living room.

  Will remembers the symbol because it looked like something it probably wasn’t. He scribbles down the JL, which he thought was for J. Lindeberg, however unlikely. Mike with the no-longer-pierced ear and the thick accent and the cheap suit wasn’t a customer of a Swedish fashion label.

  “You know what that is? I saw some guy wearing a watch with this logo.”

  “Sure. That’s Jaeger-LeCoultre. Swiss.”

  “How fancy is that?”

  “How fancy? Very fancy. Same league as this.” The old man raises his arm a couple of inches, his wrist facing Will. “Starting prices probably seventy-five hundred, ten grand.”

  “Are there knockoffs?”

  “I’m sure there are fakes of everything expensive.”

  “I mean Canal Street–type knockoffs.”

  “Doubt it. Jaeger’s not a household-name luxury brand, not like Rolex or Gucci, all that fake crap you can buy anywhere. I’d be shocked if there’s a market for people who want to buy hundred-dollar imitation Jaegers. No, if you saw a guy wearing a Jaeger, you saw a guy wearing a five-figure timepiece.”

  —

  Will reemerges to the street, around a corner, into the tentacles of a movie shoot, the production assistants in their headsets and bell-bottoms, shunting pedestrians off to the side. The street is lined with gleaming vintage vehicles, late sixties or early seventies, tremendously long coupes with grooviness signifiers hanging from rearview mirrors, a delivery truck decorated with the names of bygone brands, a streamlined bicycle leaning against a fireplug.

  “I’m sorry, we need everyone to keep moving. Keep moving, please.”

  Up close, Will can see that the cars’ interiors are shabby—torn upholstery, rusted levers, missing glove-box doors. He wonders if these cars are even operable. Maybe they’re just shells, exteriors that have been given fresh powder-coats and whitewalled tires but nonfunctioning engines. Nothing but artificial constructs, created to make people think something’s going on that’s not.

  Will finds a hard seat in a crowded café, the high-decibel rattle of the bean grinder, the thrum of the espresso machine, the hiss of the steaming milk, clanking spoons and clattering cups, aggressively loud badinage at the table behind him, a man clearly trying to get into a woman’s pants, tiresomely.

  Will’s phone rings, Malcolm calling. Will hits Ignore.

  November 1994 was the Scandinavia issue. There’s an article about every country, even Greenland. Fjords and fabrics, fermented shark and pickled herring, lingonberry compote and smoked puffin, summer cottages and the ice hotel, hot springs and geysers and volcanoes and glaciers, the midnight sun and the northern lights…

  Will cares about only two of the articles, the ones written by Jonathan Mongeleach, and it doesn’t take him long to find what he’s looking for.

  But the other issue, March 1992? No articles by Jonathan, none about Scandinavia, nothing that grabs Will’s attention. Other than being the first issue that went to press after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Will can’t see anything remarkable about March 1992.

  He’s missing something, he’s sure of it. He turns back to the beginning.

  —

  Malcolm leaves a message—“Hey Will, Malcolm here, about that drink tonight: can we make it six o’clock? I’m out of the office for a couple hours, call me on my cell.”

  The car stops on a busy corner in East Midtown. Hector cranes his neck around, looking at the busy intersection. “You sure this is it, boss?”

  “Yes, thanks Hector, this is it,” Malcolm says. “See you tomorrow.”

  Malcolm climbs out of the car, turns the corner onto the side street, and climbs again into the silver SUV, which has another of Stonely’s guys behind the wheel. Malcolm doesn’t know this guy’s name.

  They drive down the river, over a bridge, into Brooklyn on an expressway. After a few miles they exit to traffic-free surface streets, bombed-out buildings, empty warehouses, vacant lots. The truck pulls to a stop in front of a decrepit row house, the front door plastered with stickers proclaiming CONDEMNED and ORDER OF SHERIFF, draped with a chained padlock.

  Malcolm climbs out. In the distance he can see the full length of Manhattan’s skyline, even the top of his own apartment building. That’s a different city. Far more people live in this one.

  He walks around to the rear of the building, a trash-strewn yard with the unlikely inclusion of a porta potty. Bangs on the reinforced steel door with the side of his fist, boom-boom. Sees the flash of the peephole before he hears the locks uncl
icking, a heavy deadbolt sliding, the squeak of the door opening.

  A large man stands in the small, dark, tight vestibule, next to a barstool, with an electrical outlet occupied by a cell-phone charger, the phone itself on the floor; everybody everywhere is charging a cell phone. Alonso relocks the outer door, then uses a key to open the inner one.

  Malcolm steps inside, and the door closes behind him with a firm slam, then click-clack-thud, locked again.

  The windowless basement is spare, utilitarian. A boiler looms in the corner, with a hot-water heater, a big tank for something, all these pipes disconnected. A couple of buckets, a mop, electrical boxes spewing ganglia of frayed wires, a rubber garbage can.

  In the middle, under a bare bulb, the guy who has been calling himself Steven Roberts is sitting on a wooden chair. His arms are bound to his body, his legs at the ankles and knees, all with copious lengths of duct tape. There’s something in his mouth that looks like balled-up sweatsocks, held in place with more duct tape, which has a smear of blood on it that spilled, apparently, from his right nostril. His shoes and socks have been removed.

  “Hi,” Malcolm says. “My name is Malcolm Somers.”

  Steven’s eyes widen in terror. A few feet in front of him is a folding table.

  “As you are no doubt aware, you’ve been fucking my wife. I don’t blame you for that. My wife is a very attractive woman, isn’t she?”

  The guy can’t answer, of course.

  “Should I call you Steven? Or is that a name you use only with Allison?”

  The guy watches Malcolm walk to the folding table, look down at the items arrayed across the surface, an assortment of tools, a hammer, wire cutters, a wrench, pliers.

  “Honestly, Steven, I guess I’d fuck her too, if I were you.”

  Malcolm picks up the wire cutters, holds them to his face. Watches the mechanism as he squeezes the handles. Puts down this tool, fingers the others. He picks up the hammer, hefts it, feeling the weight of the tool, its balance.