The Travelers (11 page)

“
Scusi,
” she says. “
Una sigaretta, per favore?
” Cigarettes to the rescue, again. Ironic.

He inhales while examining her, a hotel guest probably, might be sneaking out, but who knows why, who knows who she is, could be rich or powerful, not a woman to refuse casually, not for the price of a cigarette. He pats his pockets, finds the packet.

“
Grazie,
” she says, leaning forward, retrieving the cigarette with her lips. He flips open a Zippo and flicks its wheel, a whiff of the sparked flint followed by a strong hit of butane, then tobacco smoke pouring into her lungs. It takes all her power to not cough.

“Prego.”

She continues to the front, and lifts the gate latch with the cuff of her sweater, allows it to reengage quietly. Her footsteps are nearly silent in rubber soles. She hustles to the dark embrace of the unlit street.

A car comes speeding up the road, which seems even narrower on foot than it did when she was a passenger. She’ll need to be careful to not get killed here.

At the bottom of the hill, it’s an abrupt transition from quiet night to noisy civilization, clusters of houses, landscaped yards, parallel-parked cars and streetlamps and—
shit
—the unmistakable strobe of police lights.

What should she look like? Who should she be?

She ditches the cap, the fake eyeglasses. Fluffs her hair, makes a quick pass of lipstick, swaps out sneakers for heels again, places her handbag into the crook of her arm. There.

It’s late, but the town is very much alive, clusters of people in piazzas, in the cafés and restaurants, drinking and smoking and eating. The police car’s lights are flashing while the cop mediates between two men who are obviously intoxicated. Only a handful of police on the planet will ever in their lives chase a serial killer, but in most countries every single cop will break up a fight between drunks again and again.

The policeman, bored with his tedious task, glances her way. Her heart sinks and she almost stumbles, meeting this cop’s eye from fifty feet away. She offers a tiny smile, trying to quell her panic. She really doesn’t want to talk to police. This might be the very cop who ends up investigating the disappearance, the homicide. The Capri police force can’t be huge.

She’s careful not to speed up, but maintains a steady pace. She feels eyes on her back, watching her ass, watching this single girl walk up the street, late at night, the ever present specter of sexual assault mingling with the unique risk of being arrested on suspicion of murder, opposite ends of the danger spectrum, both risks real.

Maybe she didn’t think this through clearly enough.

She turns onto a narrow lane, climbs the stone steps of the two-star
pensione.

“
Buona sera,
” she says to another clerk at another hotel. “
Otto.
”

She checked into this hotel this morning, deposited her carry-on in room 8, paid a surcharge for early occupation, along with the night’s fee, in cash.

She stares at herself in the mirror that hangs over the cheap bureau in the tiny room. A single bed? She hasn’t slept in a single bed in years. It looks like college.

Will she be able to sleep tonight? Should she even bother trying?

Did she really just murder a man in cold blood?

She looks in the mirror for signs that she’s different, that she has become a different person. She searches her irises, the same eyes she’s been meeting in mirrors for three decades, except—what’s this?—a little fleck of something on her skin, at the corner of her eye, and she reaches up tentatively, dabs the tip of her forefinger onto her flesh, and she wipes it away, the dead man’s blood.

She’s still who she is. Isn’t she?

MENDOZA

“Why me?” Will asks. They’re sitting at a secluded outdoor table on the tiled patio. It’s chilly; all the other hotel guests are inside. “Why go to all this expense and, um,
trouble
to recruit me?”

“You recently took a weeklong trip to Belgium and Luxembourg, where you spent three hours at a party in the residence of the grand duke, whose guests were some of the most prominent businessmen and diplomats in the Low Countries.”

“How do you know about that?”

“After the party you went up the block to an expat bar, where you drank with a crowd that included at least one MI6 agent, and an arms dealer who flirts with breaking the law—he’s careful—and the Romanian mistress of an Eastern European ambassador. Do you remember her? Long legs, long eyelashes, no bra?”

“Uh…”

“You travel around the world, in and out of embassies and palaces and exclusive events, with press credentials. With the impunity that comes from an ironclad legend. How many people in the world have similar access and cover, do you think? A couple dozen?”

“How the hell would I know? How would
you
know?”

“We are the largest, most thorough intelligence-gathering service in the history of civilization. Because of technology, it’s now possible for the CIA to identify many of the best possible assets in the world without leaving Virginia. And you, Will Rhodes, are one of them. We’ve been watching you for a long time.”

“Why the whole convoluted extortion? Why not just ask?”

“Because you’d say no.”

“How are you so sure?”

“Because the college classes you took in government and history were
all
taught by left-wing—many of them radical—professors. You took a class in Marxian philosophy. For a course about American foreign policy, you wrote a paper about the Agency’s misadventures in Latin America, claiming that the CIA has no right to do nearly everything the CIA does.”

Will barely remembered. Did he really write such a paper? “That was long ago.”

“Have you changed your mind? You’re a longtime subscriber to
The Nation
and
The New Republic, The New Yorker
and
The New York Times.
The web pages you click through to—exclusive of the porn—”

“Hey, c’mon—”

“—of both the sexual sort and the culinary and architectural sorts—are consistent with a far-left ideology. You’ve signed petitions that oppose the NYPD’s stop-and-search policy, and the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, plus those that support gay rights, Planned Parenthood, and an increase in taxes on the ultra-wealthy. You participated, in a passive way, in Occupy Wall Street. Do you want me to go on?”

Will is shell-shocked.

“You would’ve said no, Will Rhodes. My job was to get you to say yes.”

NAPLES

Police are everywhere. She feels herself wilting in their gazes, eyes darting, sweating, fidgeting, fingering her eyeglasses, clutching her boarding pass and Colombian passport, a document she acquired for this trip, the ID of a person who can’t be found, doesn’t exist.

She realizes that she looks like a version of precisely what she doesn’t want to look like. She needs to get her shit together.

But the TV on the far side of the departures lounge is deeply alarming. On-screen,
polizia
are milling around an indistinguishable location, clumps of uniforms and clusters of suits, holding walkie-talkies, looking like they’re gossiping, talking about football, women, whatever. The headline says something about murder, but the screen is too far away for her to read, and she doesn’t want to leave the queue.

A blue-uniformed policeman is walking in her direction. Her eye is drawn reflexively to the cop; she can barely bring herself to glance at anything else.

She’s really falling apart.

The boarding queue is moving slowly for this short flight to Rome, a ticket bought last night, changed today to an earlier departure once she’d arrived at the airport, after the sunrise walk down to the jetty, the ferry across the bay, the bumpy taxi to the airport.

Assuming the worst. What’s the worst? That the cops have already discovered the body. Maybe someone on that yacht noticed something,
Aaah! Call the police!
And they came immediately, though it’s the weekend? And the police connected the dead body to her hotel? And they located last night’s staff, the waitress and maître d’ and desk clerk, who identified their dead guest? And the dishwasher did, after all, admit to their cigarette encounter? And they retrieved the register’s photocopy of the Colombian passport she’s holding? And they located the flight reservation and its change? All within a few hours? And they dispatched officers…?

Assuming all that: there’d be a whole team swarming around her at the gate. Not this one cop, looking hungover and bored. No. This guy is not looking for her.

No one is looking for her. Not now, not yet, probably not ever.

It’s unlikely that the hotel staff will notice their missing guests until tonight. And even when—if—they notice, will they care? They have credit cards to charge for both the Colombian woman and the American man. Or wherever his passport claims.

Finally, the gate agent takes the boarding pass, whew.

By the time anyone really looks for her, the woman carrying the passport that identifies her as Marina Delgado will have cleared customs in Turkey, walked out of the terminal, and disappeared into Istanbul.

Then the woman will walk back into the airport and board a flight home to her real life, her real husband, who thinks that she’s somewhere else entirely, doing something completely different.

NEW YORK CITY

This is the ultimate walk of shame, coming home from the stupidest mistake of his life. Will feels as if he went out into the world, and acquired a gun, and filled it with bullets, and handed this loaded weapon over to a naked woman he didn’t know, here, I’m giving you the unencumbered option to inflict immense pain on me, on my wife, look I even flipped off the safety, go ahead, fire at will, it’s completely up to you.

Now he can’t do anything about it. Once done it’s done, no take-backs, no renegotiation or second-guessing, nothing to choose except how to live with it, how to try to fall asleep knowing that there’s this loaded gun out there, in this stranger’s hand, and anytime she wants she could just shoot. Shoot him. Bang.

Will can’t believe he did this to himself, to Chloe, to his whole life.

He unfolds himself from the taxi, stares at his ramshackle house, rusted fence. The rosebush, despite Will’s benign neglect, has continued to refuse to die.

Just inside the front door, he calls out, “Chloe?”

No answer.

Will leaves his bag in the foyer and walks through the parlor floor, across the damaged elaborate parquet to the barely functional kitchen with the secondhand French stove sitting proudly but ineffectively in the corner.

He’d be surprised if his wife were home, midmorning on a weekday. Even though her new job is neither permanent nor full-time, Chloe still leaves first thing every morning, maintaining a working person’s schedule, to help her avoid becoming a nonworking person.

Will doesn’t want to see her here, now, nervous about their reunion, about the first time he’ll greet his wife as an adulterer. As a liar. As an asset of the CIA. What a combination of attributes that he didn’t possess when he left for Argentina, a very long week ago.

How did he allow himself to believe that a woman like Elle would throw herself at him, at a married man, or for that matter at any man? He refused to see what he didn’t want to see.

He’d been made an utter fool—he’d been genuine with Elle, while she’d not. It’s fine to be a fool in love, everyone hears that again and again, in books and movies and poems and songs, it’s even okay to be a fool in love with the wrong person, to be in impossible love, in unrequited love, there’s a certain type of martyrdom to it, like a war wound. But this? This was just humiliating.

She took so much from him, so easily.

“Chloe?” He wonders if his wife will be able to tell, from his kiss, from the look on his face. “You here?”

There’s no sign that anything in his house has changed. Will was vaguely, irrationally expecting to find something different. But the only thing that has changed is him.

He finds Chloe lying in bed, pushing a sleep mask up onto the top of her head.

“You okay?” he asks, standing in the doorway, reluctant to enter.

“Just tired.” She’d taken on a last-minute freelance gig that required a couple of long flights. For as long as they’d been together, they’d both been this way, midday naps, midnight meals, perpetually trying to conquer jet lag. “And you? How was Argentina?”

Will has this one chance to tell the truth, before he starts lying; this is the fork in his road. Another fork. Once he utters the first lie, omits the first truth, he knows that this lie will engender an avalanche of others, and he won’t be able to untell any of them, they will instantly become part of his permanent record, of his marriage, his life. He will be a cheat and a liar, and that’s what he’ll be forever.

Or he can just come out with it: I got seduced, Chloe, and I cheated, I got blackmailed, it’s the CIA, they want me to inform for them, they’ll pay me, I can do it or not, completely up to you, I was wrong, I’m sorry, you tell me what to do, and did I say I’m sorry? I’m really very extremely sorry.

He could tell the truth. It would be painful, no doubt about it. It would be horrible. But they would survive it, wouldn’t they? Should they?

Yes, he could tell the truth. But he doesn’t.

“Jesus,” Malcolm says, “what happened to you?”

Will jumps in his chair. This is the first time anyone has come to find him here in the small room that houses the archives.

“Oh?”—reaching up to touch his swollen cheek, as if he’d forgotten about it—“I got into a scuffle, in a dance club.”

“What? Where? What happened?”

“B.A. Not a big deal, this looks a lot worse than it is. It was late, there was pushing and shoving, fists flying, one landed on my face. I don’t even know what the fight was about, or who hit me. I was just an unlucky bystander.”

“My God. Did you go to a hospital?”

“For this? Come on, Malcolm.” Will feels his foot tapping under the table, nerves from this lying he’s doing, one lie after another.

“Okay, macho man.” Malcolm stands in the doorway, in his rolled-up sleeves and his loosened necktie and his smooth, easy smile. Not a care in the world, the lucky bastard. “So what are you searching for today, Rhodes?” Malcolm looks around disapprovingly at the windowless, charmless utilitarian space. “More overexposed locations?”

Will hasn’t been searching for anything, not in the old magazine pages. But he has to answer Malcolm somehow. “We’ve published a lot of jingoist propaganda over the years.”

“Oh yeah? When was that?”

“All the way through the eighties. Ugly, sometimes racist stuff.”

Malcolm doesn’t look entirely comfortable with this conversation. He’s the guy in charge, the one who’d need to take responsibility, to make apologies, for the missteps and mistakes of his predecessors. This is how institutions work.

“Tell me about the rest of Argentina, Rhodes. The contemporary, nonviolent parts.”

“It was good.” Will practiced, at home, in the mirror. “Very photogenic, very easy to understand from images. I think I’ve had enough Malbec to last a lifetime”—he tries to chortle, though it comes out more of a cough—“but there was a wide variety of it, and compelling personality-driven wine-ish anecdotes. It’ll be a fine piece, done quickly.”

“Well, I guess you’re not completely worthless.”

Will has actually spent the past hours completely worthlessly, not saying or doing much of anything, not talking to anyone. He was worried that people could see it on him, smell it. So he’d come here to hide.

“You sure you’re okay, Rhodes?”

“Me? No. I mean, my face hurts…”

Malcolm is still staring at him, assessing. Will struggles to maintain eye contact, to not flinch, not blink, not look away. He feels his heartbeat accelerating, the seconds ticking by.

“You finally did it, didn’t you?”

“Did what?”

Malcolm breaks into a smile. “You gave in to temptation. You
bastard
. Who was it?”

Will shakes his head.

“Not going to tell me? After all these years, Rhodes? You’re going to keep this a secret? From
me
?”

“There is no secret.”

“Is
that
what got you punched in the face?”

Will doesn’t say anything.

“You lying to me, Rhodes?”

“Asked and answered.” Will tries to smile wider, increasingly panicked that he’s saying wrong thing after wrong thing, digging into a hole while Malcolm shovels soil onto his head.

“I’ll get it out of you sooner or later, Rhodes. You know that, right?”

Malcolm buttons his jacket, pushes back his hair, checks his plain ordinary manila folder. He’s dubious of people who bring accessories like padded-leather presentation folders to meetings, résumés on extra-heavy textured paper, ballplayers with matched sets of superfluous gear, overcompensation, distracting from a dearth of convincing content with an excess of compelling package. Malcolm plays tennis in tee shirts; he comes to meetings with manila folders.

The executive conference room is large and airy, floor-to-ceiling windows onto the avenue. The long high-gloss table is surrounded by occupied chairs, people he mostly doesn’t recognize, though at the head is a well-known man in a well-tailored suit.

“Hi, my name is Malcolm Somers. I’m the editor of
Travelers.
”

A few heads nod at him, in hello and agreement, okay guy, let’s get started.

“I may be biased—I am, obviously, biased—but I think our founding was one of the greatest product launches ever. In today’s era in which consultants are paid to craft so-called authentic brand narratives, our origin story doesn’t need any embellishments.”

Malcolm punches a button on the laptop, and the preloaded PowerPoint launches behind him. PowerPoint, like leather presentation folders, is something that Malcolm suspects is used more for obfuscation than for clarification. But a decade in conference rooms has beaten out his recalcitrance, and he finally gave in, and asked his tech guru, Stonely Rodriguez, for a tutorial.

“It’s 1945, the waning months of the war. Benjamin Donaldson has been recuperating in Walter Reed from life-threatening injuries sustained in France, the Nazis’ last gasp.” A black-and-white photo, a man with a circumspect smile under blackened eyes. “Benji had been stabbed in Marseille, massive hemorrhaging, almost died in that alley near the old port.”

Malcolm wrote a script for this, printed it out, rehearsed in a mirror, then discarded the pages. He never reads aloud, except bedtime stories. And at this point he has dozens of the kids’ books memorized, so even his read-alouds aren’t, technically, reading aloud.

“But before his encounter with the switchblade, Benji had seen a lot of France, and had been awestruck by the beauty.” Click, black-and-white shots of the beach at St-Tropez, the Provençal massifs, medieval villages, intercut with color reproductions of Van Gogh’s wheat fields, Monet’s cathedrals.

“So Benji is bored to death there in the hospital, trying to figure out what to do with his life. Before the war, he’d gone to Dartmouth, then New York, a job in pulp magazines. He figures that’s the business to which he’ll return. But he can’t get his mind off Europe. And he thinks there are a lot of guys like him, millions of them, servicemen who’d gotten a glimpse of Europe and the South Pacific and North Africa, guys who’d seen some of the world.”

Click, click, click: the azure waters of the Blue Grotto in Capri, sand dunes in the Sahara, a tropical lagoon in the South Pacific.

“Benji has a vision for a new breed of American tourist. He foresees falling costs for air travel, and rapid expansion of routes; he expects a strong dollar. In fact, Benji anticipates all the factors that contribute to an unprecedented postwar tourist boom. And because he’s from a magazine background, he envisages a new glossy to cater to this heretofore nonexistent demo: the middle-class international traveler.

“Benji raises money. He hires accomplished journalists and photographers, all suffering combat fatigue, PTSD before it had a name. All looking for a less gruesome version of their occupation.”

Malcolm pauses, glances around, signaling that another type of comment is coming. He does this whenever he tells this story. “Their experience is something I can relate to. After years of covering Afghanistan and Iraq, and sustaining injuries—IED shrapnel in the shoulder and torso—I still wanted to write, but I no longer wanted to fear for my life.”

One of the reasons Malcolm went abroad was to see what war was like. To be around mortal danger, to feel scared, all the time. He can’t believe, now, his recklessness then. This is probably what it means to be middle-aged: to be horrified by the irresponsibility of your own youth.

Maybe it was for the best. If he hadn’t gotten injured, he wouldn’t have come home, he wouldn’t have this wife, these kids, this job, his life. He might instead be dead, blown up in a hotel, or kidnapped and murdered, like their African correspondent, just last year.

“Benji’s overseas personnel are joined in New York by cutting-edge designers and visionary editors. This energetic staff creates nothing short of a cultural sensation.”

Click: the cover of volume 1, issue 1.

“From the debut,
Travelers
’ pages are packed with stunning photographs—think
Life
, without the depressing stuff—that accompany long, evocative, in-depth articles—nearly novella-length,
New Yorker–
esque.
Travelers
is providing a total immersion, catering not only to the moneyed and/or adventurous who actually buy PanAm and TWA tickets, but also to the bigger, more rapidly expanding audience of armchair travelers. A demo practically invented by
Travelers.
This audience is irresistible to advertisers in the golden age of print, and
Travelers
is turning a profit within five years.”