The Expats (12 page)

8

Monday afternoon, and it was pouring.

Kate stood alone in front of the school, resting her umbrella so low that her head was touching the striped nylon, the aluminum ribs sitting on her shoulder, trying to safeguard the few undrenched portions of her body. Everything below the waist was soaked, squishing, unsalvageable.

Sheets of big, heavy drops were flooding from the dark, dense sky, pounding the concrete, thrumming the grass, loudly splattering in the deep puddles that had pooled in every dip or swale, crack or crevasse.

The mother groups were neatly divided by nationality. There were the self-sufficient groups of blue-eyed Danes and blond Dutch, of high-heel-wearing Italians and ultra-healthy Swedes. The intermingled English-language groups dominated by pale Brits, with chunky Americans and ever-smiling Australians and aggressively friendly Kiwis, the occasional Irish and Scot. There were the hyper-insular Indians, and the utterly unapproachable Japanese. Individual roving Russians and Czechs and Poles, hoping to attach themselves to Western Europe, ingratiating, firm-handshaking, trying to get invited to join the EU, ignorant—willfully?—of the universal futility of trying to get invited to anything, ever.

There were even a few men scattered around, not talking to one another, each in his own independent orbit of strangeness.

Technically, Kate was no longer hungover from Saturday night. But she was still physically tired from the lack of sleep—the children had awoken at seven
A.M.
on Sunday, oblivious to their parents’ late night—and her body still felt nonspecifically wrong.

She also felt a psychic unease, partially attached to what she may have witnessed of Bill’s infidelity, partially to Julia’s inappropriate exhibitionism aimed at Dexter. Partially to Bill’s heroic behavior—overly
heroic?—in the face of muggers. And partially to her own desperation, back at the hotel, in the bathroom, the door locked against any sleepwalking children, descending famished on Dexter, begging him for more, harder, while uncontrollable images flitted through her imagination, of people who were not her husband, and sometimes not herself, their slickened bodies, their lips and tongues …

It was now raining even harder. She wouldn’t have guessed that was possible.

Kate couldn’t put her finger on exactly what had happened to the four of them, late on Saturday night in Paris, and whether it was good, or bad, or both.

“LISTEN,” DEXTER SAID, “I’m going to be late tonight.” Again.

Kate and the boys had changed out of their wet things, into soft sweats and slippers, enfolded in fleece. But she was still having a hard time shaking the chill of the latest in a long series of drenchings. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. I’m going to play tennis. With Bill.”

They hadn’t said a word about Julia and Bill since they got into separate taxis at four thirty in the morning on the avenue George V, four days ago.

“He has an
abonnement
for a court at a club, and his regular partner canceled.”

An image ran across her brain, Bill shirtless in the locker room, unbuckling his belt, pushing down his …

Kate deposited the phone in its cradle, next to the laptop, facing onto the usually majestic view, which was now a vast expanse of cloud and fog and rain against the browns and grays of the leafless trees, the slates and blacks of the stone roofs, the beiges and tans of the stone fortifications and rock outcroppings and cobblestone streets.

It was dreary, and she was alone again, back from another Wednesday afternoon in the windowless basement of the sports center at Kockelscheuer, talking about bikini waxes. She used to be a person who did things. Not just run-of-the-mill normal-job things, but life-and-death things. Illegally crossing international borders. Eluding police. Hiring assassins, for God’s sake. Now she was folding laundry. Could her life really have become this?

“When is Daddy coming home?” Jake asked, his teddy clutched to
his chest, his brother silent at his side, both boys cold and tired and wanting their dad, again.

“I’m sorry, sweetie,” Kate said. “He won’t be home till after you’re asleep.”

Ben turned angrily, quickly, and walked away. But Jake stayed. “Why?” he asked. “Why can’t he be home?”

“Oh, he wants to, sweetie. But he has other things he needs to do, sometimes.”

The boy wiped a tear from his cheek. Kate gathered him in her arms. “I’m sorry, Jake. But I promise that Daddy will give you a kiss when he gets home. Okay?”

He nodded, fighting back more tears, then sulked off and joined his brother, who was already busying himself with Lego.

Kate sat down at the computer. She moved aside files—
L
UXEMBOURG RENTAL FURNITURE
and
LUXEMBOURG SCHOOLS
and
LUXEMBOURG UTILITIES.
She waited for the machine to locate the wireless signal. She stared at the screen, second-guessing what she was about to do. What she was hoping to find, and whether or not she wanted to.

It didn’t occur to her that she was doing exactly what she was expected to.

But before she could do anything, the phone rang again.

“THANKS SO MUCH,” Julia said. “I feel completely lost with the Internet down.”

“No problem.” Kate shut the door behind Julia. “I know exactly how you feel. Boys, say hello to Julia.”

“Hi!”

“Hello!”

They ran back to the kitchen, the excitement of the doorbell finished, to their kitchen service: Ben was peeling carrots, Jake cutting them into chunks. Both were standing on stepstools at the counter, concentrating hard, being careful with their sharp tools.

“You’ve got sous-chefs,” Julia said.

“Yes.” The boys were prepping for a
poule au pot
, the cookbook open on the counter, under a shelf containing a half-dozen other cookbooks, all mail-ordered from Amazon’s warehouses in England.

Julia wandered into the living room. “Wow!” She’d noticed the view. “This place is great.”

“Thanks.”

They were now in the living room, through two doors and around one corner from the children. Well out of earshot. If they were ever going to mention Saturday night, it was going to be now. But they weren’t.

“So the computer is in there,” Kate said, gesturing at the guest room.

“Thanks again. I really appreciate it. I’ll probably be ten minutes?”

“Whatever you need.” Kate left Julia alone.

THE CHILDREN WERE asleep, and Dexter was at tennis with Bill, and Kate was alone, in the gray glow of the screen, her hands resting softly on the smooth keys, pointer fingers caressing the ridges on J and F. She felt a warmness, a tingling. She was looking for an activity, to relieve her boredom. And a picture, to enrich her fantasy.

She typed: B I L L Space M A C L E A N

The first page of the search revealed one cohesive personality with that name, but it wasn’t the one she was looking for. She scrolled through page after page of results—seven, eight, nine pages, scores of links—but no one turned out to be a currency trader, recently moved from Chicago to Luxembourg, age around forty.

No Facebook. Nor LinkedIn. No university alumni updates, or high-school rosters, or society-page photos, or periodical references.

W I L L I A M Space M A C L E A N

A slightly different assortment of links, but mostly the same. On some second-tier professional-networking site, there was a page for a William Maclean of Chicago, profession listed as finance, nothing else. No picture, no links, no bio, nothing hard.

She tried other spellings—
Mclean, McLean, Maclane, Maclaine
—but the results were almost exactly the same. No one she found was him.

“WHAT ABOUT SANTIBANEZ?” Evan had asked.

“I heard that was Leo,” Kate had answered.

“Yeah, everybody heard that. You know anything more specific?”

Now that this conversation was finally taking place, Kate was relieved. It had been a long time coming. She was surprised it was so roundabout, so full of interrogations and executions and assassinations that obviously had nothing to do with her.

“Nope.”

Evan glanced down at his pad. “He was killed in Veracruz. Two to the
chest, one to the head. No abduction, no butchery, no spectacle.” Just like she’d been trained.

This was the moment in the conversation—the debriefing, the interrogation—when she finally understood the point of this endless litany of violence: they were reminding Kate that even though she’d been out of the field for five years, she’d still not cleansed herself of the stench of dirty ops. She never would.

“So it didn’t look like it was done by anyone in the narcotics business. What it looked like was something done by someone in our business.”

And they would always know it.

“Santibanez, he once ran with Lorenzo Romero, didn’t he?”

Romero had been a CIA informant who’d fed his handler misleading intelligence, in exchange for huge sums of cash from the
narcotraficantes
. Unfortunately, the misinformation got his handler shot in the head and dumped in Tampico harbor. The whole Mexico division agreed to dole out retribution, and Kate, the sole female in the group, would have the easiest time getting the notorious womanizer into an unguarded, private predicament.

“Like I said, I don’t know anything specific about Santibanez.”

“Okay.” Evan nodded, eyes down on his pad. “How about Eduardo Torres?”

Kate took a breath, neither too deep nor too shallow. At last, here it was.