The Expats (51 page)

On Saturday, late afternoon, she stood on the Pont Neuf, the river glinting smooth and silvery in the winter light. She retied her new scarf around her neck, tighter, warmer. She crossed back to the busy buzzing of the Left Bank, the cafés and brasseries packed for early-evening drinks and cigarettes, sunlight slipping away and replaced with electric. Waiting for a traffic light to change on a corner of the Place St-Michel,
packed with hundreds of people, Kate noticed that the tree branch hanging over the intersection was beginning to bud.

WHEN THEY LEFT Luxembourg for the summer holiday in the South of France, they thought they’d be returning in five weeks. Assumed they’d be sending the kids back to the same school, in new grades. But in that month on the Mediterranean they reexamined their plan. Did they really want to live in Luxembourg? Did they need to?

What they needed—what they
had
needed—was for Dexter to be able to open the ultra-protected numbered accounts that his scheme required. He’d needed to incorporate a
société anonyme
that would operate in a business to which no authority would give a second thought: financial-markets investing, in Luxembourg. They needed to pay income taxes somewhere that wasn’t under the jurisdiction of the FBI.

Did it need to be Luxembourg? No. It could’ve been Switzerland, or the Cayman Islands, or Gibraltar, or any number of tidy little privacy-friendly nation-states. Dexter had visited them all, back in the year before they’d moved. He’d chosen Lux because it seemed like the nicest tax haven in which to live. It was a real place, not a remote island in the Irish Sea nor a country club in the Caribbean nor a rocky outcrop of the Pyrenees. It had a thriving expat community, good schools, easy access to the cultural riches of Western Europe.

And no one in America knew what Luxembourg was. When Americans heard you were moving to Zurich or Grand Cayman, they assumed you were hiding money, or on the run, or both. No one knew what you were doing in Luxembourg.

All in all, Kate had to admit that Luxembourg had been a good choice, for the whole family. But it ended up compromised by the way it started. And by the Macleans.

Now that the Luxembourg S.A. was established, now that Dexter was making a legitimate—and surprisingly lucrative—living through his investment enterprise, now that they had residency visas and E.U. driver’s licenses, now that they’d filed income taxes in Luxembourg … now that all that was done, did they need to remain in Luxembourg?

No.

IT WAS THE children who made friends on the beach at St. Tropez. And then the next day the grown-ups introduced themselves. And then the
following day they were all together on the same beach again, and later in the week over lunch, chilled rosé and the cheerful babble of expat Americans on vacation. Kate listened to anecdotes of life in Paris, and the international school in St-Germain, and the newly soft real-estate market …

Then they were on the early flight from Marseille, the boys’ hair washed and combed, shirts tucked, the taxi from the airport to the school, the quick interviews with the children and the longer ones with the adults. And then shaking hands with the admissions officer, smiling, listening to assurances that there were spots for the boys.

They had snacks and drinks at the Flore. Then they set off again, a sultry summer weekday. They came across the
agence immobiliere
, its windows festooned with glossy photographs of apartments. They introduced themselves, and went on a quick house tour.

In the morning, they signed the school’s contract, and the apartment’s lease.

LUXEMBOURG SEEMED EMPTY in mid-August. Or empty of expats. Kate’s friends were all on family holidays—the Americans in America, the Europeans in rented seaside cottages in Sweden, or whitewashed villas in the mountains of Spain, or pastels with pools in Umbria.

Kate walked around the old town, the familiar faces of the shopkeepers, the vendors in the Place Guillaume market, the waitresses on their cigarette breaks, the palace guards. All these people whose names she didn’t know, who were part of the texture of her life. She felt like she should say farewell to each and every one of them.

She wished her friends were here, now. She felt the urge to sit in a café with Claire and Cristina and Sophia, have a final round of coffee, a final round of hugs. But it was probably better this way. She hated good-byes.

Kate returned to the apartment, a ham sandwich in a wax-paper bag, and resumed the task of sorting through the boys’ toys, picking out the discards, the donations, the keepers. They were with Dexter at the pirate-ship playground, for the last time.

It would be easier, Kate knew, the second time around. The hard parts would be less hard, the fun parts more fun. Like with the second kid, Ben: it would be less intimidating, less difficult, less bewildering, with the benefit of the prior experience.

They still needed to maintain some type of Luxembourg residency,
a place from which to file taxes, where they could pretend to live. The little rented farmhouse in the Ardennes, for a thousand a month, would serve perfectly. There was a pile of farmhouse-bound boxes shoved into the corner of the living room, packed with inexpensive lamps and cast-off dishes and mismatched flatware. With a lock-box where they would stash a million in cash.

The Colonel’s money was otherwise untouched, sitting in the same numbered account, possibly forever. It was now twenty-four million.

Kate looked out the window at the expansive view, the broad swath of Europe in her sight line, this brief home of hers. Tears welled in her eyes. She felt a heavy weight of despair at the end of this. At the inexorable march of her life forward, toward its inevitable end.

32
TODAY,
7:32
P.M.

The memories are beginning to fade, to take on an undefined tinge at the edges, a vagueness that creeps toward the center, eroding Kate’s confidence that the events actually occurred. It would make a lot more sense if she had imagined this whole thing, her whole life. Now would just be now, attached to some other, more straightforward past.

It’s been a year and a half since Kate and Julia were standing in the freezing rain on the exposed platform hanging over the monteé du Clausen, both armed and angry and unsure if one of them was going to have to kill the other.

Now in this Parisian café they meet each other’s eyes sheepishly, like new lovers after their first fight.

Julia’s body is leaning toward Bill’s, pulled magnetically. There’s something different in the way this woman and that man are together now. Perhaps more natural than they’d been before, back in Luxembourg. More something. Or maybe less.

“So,” Julia says, “what have you been up to?” She directs this to Kate. Now that the men have finished the men’s business of arms deals and dismemberments.

Kate glances at Dexter. He doesn’t meet her eye, won’t offer any guidance. He seems completely comfortable, as if there’s no possible downside to this interaction, nothing that can go wrong, no bad turn it can take. Which makes Kate doubly sure that she’s right about what really happened among them. Triply. Kate is immeasurably sure.

What she doesn’t understand is how she’s supposed to converse with these people, as if they’re all normal, and this is a real meeting among genuine friends, or even a tense confrontation between foes. What degree of honesty could Julia be expecting? What type of conversation does this woman think they’re going to have?

“Why Paris?” Julia asks. She hopes maybe a more specific question will generate an answer.

“Why not?” is Kate’s terse response.

Bill holds up his hands, gesturing at their surroundings. “Because this?” he asks. “This is fucking awful.”

There’s a pleading in Julia’s eyes. “Come on, Kate. I’m not asking for much, here. We don’t need to be … friends …”

Kate turns her eyes down.

“But we don’t have to be enemies, Kate. We’re not enemies. We’re not here … this isn’t …” She trails off, stares off.

Kate takes a long look at Julia, hands folded, elbows on the table, leaning forward, eyebrows raised, head cocked at an angle, eager to hear any tiny irrelevant detail of any beside-the-point story. Anything. In this pose of avidness, Kate thinks she recognizes something odd: friendship.

“I …” Kate suddenly feels terribly sad. “What do you want me to tell you, Julia?”

“I don’t know, Kate. Anything. Do you miss Luxembourg?”

Kate shrugs.

“I do,” Julia admits. “I miss my friends. I miss you, Kate.”

Kate has to look away, fighting the urge to cry.

“Ladies,” Bill says, raising his glass. “Let’s not be maudlin. To Luxembourg!”

Kate watches Julia raise her glass, slosh some wine on her lips, then replace the glass on the tabletop. “To Luxembourg.”

“So forgive my bluntness,” Kate says, taking the step that no one else seems willing to take, “but why are you here?”

Julia and Bill exchange a quick glance. “We came,” Julia says, “to tell you—to tell Dexter—about the Colonel.”

“Ah.” Kate nods. “I see.”

Silence again.

“I don’t understand,” Kate picks up, “why that needs to be in person. In fact, I don’t understand why you would want to do that at all. Dexter is, after all, someone you investigated—accused—of a major crime, of which you obviously still think he’s guilty.”

“We were also friends,” Julia says.

Kate leans forward. “Were we?”

They stare at each other, the two women. “I thought so. I still do.”

“But …” Kate tries to paint her bewilderment—her betrayal—all over her face.

“I was doing—
we
were doing—what we needed to do.”

Kate is relieved that Julia isn’t claiming she was just doing her job. At least she’s being honest about that. Because her job was the last thing she was doing.

“There’s something else,” Bill says, rejoining the fray. “We wanted to tell you that now that the Colonel is dead, the investigation is closed.”

“Completely?” Dexter asks.

For a moment everyone sits quietly in the loud Parisian twilight. Bill empties his glass, refills it. “Completely. And permanently.”