The Travelers (15 page)

“Things were different, and you know that.”

“—‘Malcolm, I need to come home.’ And I made a
lot
of changes to accommodate you.
Difficult
changes. I invented a new position for you. A new role.”

“And I’ve been good at it.”

“Yes you have. You have made yourself indispensable.
Doing what you do.
Not doing your old job. Not doing Will’s job.”

She doesn’t respond for a few seconds, doesn’t want to argue herself out of the compliment, but she also doesn’t want to accept it. “This is not me, Malcolm. This is not what I’m supposed to be doing with my life.”

“What can I tell you, sweetheart? That’s what it means to be a grown-up.”

“And what about Will?”

“First of all, what business is that of yours? Second: Will can do the overseas job, I’m confident of that. But he can’t do the one here. Your job.”

“Why not?”

Malcolm dips the angle of his head, levels a look at her, doesn’t say a word.

“Does he know?” she asks.

“Of course not.”

“You’ve never mentioned anything? All these years?”

“Come on, Gabs.”

“When are you going to tell him?
Are
you going to tell him?”

Malcolm doesn’t answer. “Are you saying you want to still be out there?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. But I don’t want to be passed over because I’m a woman.”

“That’s bullshit, Gabs. Not what happened, not even a tiny bit, and you damn well know it.” Malcolm can be accused of many things that women might find offensive. But he’s not this type of sexist. “I’m a misanthrope, not a misogynist. There’s a difference.”

“Why is it you who has your job, Malcolm? And not me?”

Malcolm has wondered the same thing. Gabriella has been at
Travelers
longer, she has more management experience, more New York person-about-town experience, she looks and sounds better on TV and in front of a big crowd. What she doesn’t have is real foreign-journalism experience, but that shouldn’t matter. And she doesn’t have a Y chromosome.

“I don’t know, Gabs.” Malcolm is pretty sure it was indeed sexism. It just wasn’t Malcolm’s.

They ride in silence, both knowing that Malcolm is lying, neither seeing any benefit in pursuing it any further.

“Have you heard from him?” she asks.

Malcolm shakes his head. “You?”

She too shakes her head. This time, neither knows if the other is lying.

The car pulls to a stop in front of the Village Academy. The curb is lined with a phalanx of imported SUVs, nearly all black, with hazards blinking and bourgeois-bohemian people behind the wheels, Hot Moms in workout gear and aviators, Cool Dads in trucker caps and facial hair,
MONTAUK
stickers in the windshields and/or surfboards on the roof racks of the Range Rovers and AMGs.

“I don’t want to wait in the car,” he says. “I feel like too much of a jackass. You want to get out with me? Or Hector can take you back to the office? Or somewhere else?”

“I’ll get out. Survey the local fauna.”

“Thanks Hector,” Malcolm says. “See you tomorrow.”

Malcolm climbs out of the backseat. He wishes he could pretend that this liveried car is just a onetime thing, because it’s raining—it’s not—or the subways are all fucked up—they’re not, as far as he knows—or because he has some physical problem—he doesn’t. He briefly considers exaggeraing his limp, proving to all these witnesses that the reason he’s getting out of a chauffeured car is that he’s injured—there are plenty of injuries he can imagine fabricating—but of course Gabriella would notice, and ask, what the fuck are you doing?

Maybe he’ll tell Hector to keep a cane in the trunk, for future hoaxes. Or a pair of crutches. Malcolm has an increasingly deep fascination with elaborate hoaxes.

He looks around the busy sidewalk while a few heads turn, some eyes glance up from devices. He’s one of the full-time-working dads, wearing a business suit—the suit-wearing population doesn’t as a rule make it to three o’clock pickup—and getting out of a black car with a stunning woman to whom he’s not married. That’ll get people talking.

“I see that some men are allowed to gather their young. That’s progressive.”

The few handfuls of guys are mostly wearing jeans and some version of sneakers. These are guys who call their sons “buddy,” which Malcolm loathes, for reasons he finds himself unable to articulate.

“So, Mal, are the rumors true?”

“Sorry, what are we talking about now?”

“Are the terms of the sale final? Are we about to be swallowed up by an evil international conglomerate?” The acquisition was begun under Jonathan’s tenure, and then the deal stalled, until it was renewed with heightened vigor and urgency a few months ago.

He cocks his head, rolls his eyes,
well…
“I don’t know about
evil.
”

“Good God.”

“We don’t really have a choice. The bottom line has been the wrong color for years.”

“How is a merger going to solve that problem?”

“Efficiencies.”

“You mean layoffs.”

“Layoffs. And write-offs,” he says. “Plus depreciation.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, do you?”

“Of course not. I’m an editor, not a suit.”

She looks his suit up and down.

“What can I tell you, Gabs? The sale is not my call, obviously. But we’re going to have to be extra-careful now.”

The merger itself isn’t the threat; it’s the increased scrutiny that Malcolm is worried about. The possibility that some new boss will arrive with a new curiosity about what Malcolm does in the secret room behind his office wall.

“This is a very dangerous time for us. We could both end up unemployed.
Very
soon.”

This is not news to Gabs, but she nods, agreeing.

“Why the hell do we do this, Malcolm?”

He gestures at the melee unfolding, a hundred kids streaming out of the school, into the arms of a hundred loved ones. “Why does anyone do anything?”

Even as it’s coming out of his mouth, he realizes this comment is a mistake. In fact, he shouldn’t even have invited Gabriella to come along to school; that was insensitive. Malcolm finds it hard to remember where Gabriella is in the world, that she doesn’t have absolutely everything, because she usually looks so much like she does.

“Gabs, you know I need you, right?”

“Do you?”

Malcolm sees his eldest, Sylvie, emerge from the heavy steel doors, blah-blah-blahing to her little companion, who’s blah-blah-blahing right back at her, both little girls talking at cross-purposes, full volume, ignoring the other.

“Please, Gabs, I have to ask you to trust me on this.”

She looks him in the eye, searching for something, then nods, walks away. The men nearby all pretend they’re not watching her, but most don’t do a very convincing job of it.

Malcolm wonders if Gabriella is going to be a problem, on top of all the other problems. A whole smorgasbord of problems, a rich and varied feast of things Malcolm does not want to eat. How did life get so complicated?

STOCKHOLM

The American climbs out of the taxi in front of the warehouse in the farthest reaches of Södermalm. He manages to survive the doorman’s dubious scrutiny, and pays his cover charge, and walks through the thumping entry hall into the cavernous dance club, a thousand people in here, maybe more, everyone younger than he, nearly all of them by four decades, even five.

He beckons a bartender with a large-denomination bill. “I’ll have a beer!” he yells. “And I’m looking for Lars!”

The cap pops off and foam bubbles over as the bottle hits the bar. “Over there”—inclining his head. The American turns to the shadowy corner, where a man by himself leans against a wall, surveying the scene, bopping his head to the beat.

“Thanks!” He leaves a big tip, a memorable tip. The American who leaves the big tips is how he wants bartenders and waitresses and bellhops and taxi drivers to remember him, a favor banked in the endless circle of transactions that is life, deposits and withdrawals, credit and insolvency. And it makes him look like someone who’s not hiding; people who are hiding don’t leave memorable tips.

“Hello Lars.”

A reluctant nod. “Wel-wel-welcome back to The Warehouse, Joe. Do you like it tonight, is there something I can g-g-get you, I see you al-al-already have a b-b-beer, is there some-some-something else you would, ah, like?”

“What do you have to offer?”

Lars glances over, a quick assessment. “I can offer ev-ev-everything. I be-believe you know that. A young bl-bl-blond girl, perhaps? Or would it be a b-b-boy for you?”

“I’m looking for something unusual. Can we go somewhere quiet?”

Lars turns to face him fully, the disco strobe cutting a rapid bright swath across both their faces. “Pl-pl-please. F-f-follow me.”

The stuttering Swedish clubber leads the way, skirting the black-painted brick wall, picking his way through the heaving humanity of dancers, under a high arch and into a wide low-ceilinged hall where kids on Ecstasy and crystal meth and coke are making out and groping at crotches and tits and asses, a bare shoulder here and an exposed breast there, a cock clutched in a fist whose every finger is adorned with at least one ring, a cluster of people looking on in expectation, unsure what’s going to happen next, to whom, but it sure will be something.

At the end of the hall a red light illuminates a fire door that Lars pushes through, its alarm disabled, as these things often are, into the open air. They climb a set of exposed metal stairs to a catwalk that connects the warehouse to another structure.

It’s quiet out here, the music a distant hum. The American is disoriented, in the middle of this industrial campus, unsure where’s the street and where’s the water, trying to figure it out from the light level on the dusky horizon, but who the hell cares.

“T-t-tell me, what is it you are loo-loo-looking for?”

“Travel documents.” The American has an alternate passport—of course he does, at least one, always—but it’s best to get a fresh one if possible. Fake passports have invisible expiration dates.

“This is n-n-not inexpensive.”

“I understand that.”

Lars lights a cigarette, exhales a cloud of smoke over the rail of the narrow bridge hanging over the truck track forty feet below, a long drop. “L-l-let me see what I can do.”

EDINBURGH

Will stands at the top of the Royal Mile and takes in his surroundings along with a deep breath of the clean air, a whiff of salt coming from the Firth of Forth. He looks around, his vision sharply focused, hyper-aware of his surroundings, the people.

He began to notice this new excess of clarity yesterday, on the trip from London, looking up from his e-book, a CIA memoir. This was the fourth book in that genre he’d read in as many weeks, all loaded onto the tablet, so no one could see what he was reading. Now Will understands why so many people had recently become so willing to read porn.

His secret reading these days is homework, trying to educate himself about his new line of work, just like his research in the
Travelers
archives. Will has been a dedicated practitioner of homework his whole life, as much in adulthood as in childhood. He studies maps and old articles, guidebooks and language primers, essays and memoirs and cookbooks and, now, books about being a spy.

The train was passing through all those grand Victorian sheds, red brick walls and arched roofs supported by fluted columns and iron trestles, massive clocks precise to the second. The countryside was uneventful, suburban housing in turns squat stony-mossy or self-consciously modern in futuristic shapes—cylindrical structures, triangular roofs—fabricated from matte metal in primary colors. Black-faced sheep grazed fields atop dark stark bluffs beside the rocky North Sea beaches, the angry Turner sea under a brooding Wyeth sky, all the expected grays.

A teenage boy was sitting in front of Will, nervously fondling his ticket, a small overnight bag perched beside him, wearing only one ear bud, so he could hear the world. Nervous, maybe traveling alone for the first time, wearing new shoes, a pressed shirt.

Will was aware of absorbing everything, ruling out possibilities, speculating about this over-groomed boy, about everyone, the surly conductor with the incomprehensible accent, the giddy young women who boarded in Leeds, the lecherous guy who sauntered through the musty coach, giving every woman the eye.

Will felt as if he’d previously been wandering through life in a haze, all his experiences dulled in a miasma of low stakes. Not anymore.

The sights of Edinburgh are recognizable, the layout of the city familiar—you can see it all before you.

Will waits in the gathering midmorning heat amid the babel of a tourist-attraction ticket queue. Behind Will a toddler is in apparent crisis, desperately wanting something that’s impossible to provide. This crowd is heavy on professional-looking tourists in their task-specific lightweight water-wicking manmade-fiber gear, with profuse zippers and pockets and mesh vents for breathability. There are hobbled undefeated old people, and panic-stricken Chinese, and towering magenta-haired German women and skinny smoky Frenchmen, everyone all pressed together, waiting to take the glossy brochure and hang the audio player around their necks, like digital cowbells.

Will always—100 percent of the time—takes the audio tour.

He eats haggis. He does the thing that’s done, dumplings in Hong Kong and
mole
in Oaxaca and pizza in Naples, searching for the ideal expression of the commonplace.

And now, he’s also searching for something else.

DUBLIN

The rain comes down in sheets, a steeply sideways rain, an aggressively drenching rain that no umbrella can thwart, soaking Will’s pants and shoes and socks. Will totes the
Travelers-
issued camera through Georgian Dublin, snapshots of the unornamented bricks, severe façades, orderly windows and black wrought-iron gates, the understated properness of it all, Merrion Square, St. Stephen’s Green, the regimented quads of Trinity College. Everything that’s not gray is green.

Will takes a public tour of another ancient castle, this time with a handful of avid Irish-Americans. He takes a private tour of Leinster House, shakes hands with a couple of distracted members of parliament, on their way to and from everything more important than chitchat with a marginal American journo. It’s on these rare occasions when he’s face-to-face with real newsmakers, or real news reporters, that he most intensely feels the gap between what he once wanted to become and what he actually is. Carrying around his little notebook as if he’s writing a real story, though it’s just a couple hundred words about fish pie, or stout.

At night he meanders through the banal raucousness of Temple Bar, like the Latin Quarter in Paris, Bourbon Street in New Orleans, any other well-known party district, nominal cover charges and halfhearted ID checks, debilitating shots and saccharine chasers, the music too loud and the crowds too dense, the panicked crush of last call, stumbling in the streets, the dangerous mess of mass intoxication.

Will flees this place, nothing new here, nothing good. He heads to a working-class pub in North Dublin, a place recommended by his airport taxi driver. Away from the college kids and semesters-abroad, in a roughish-looking neighborhood, he drinks pints of Guinness, warm and flat and bitter.

He stays late, then steps out into the deserted street, a foreboding chill. A block or two away, tires screech. From another direction, a loud laugh, the threatening sort. Will hears a man shout and a dog bark, the same sounds of dangerous dark anywhere. He’s more aware of them than he used to be.

He’s a couple of miles from his hotel, and he suspects he’s not going to find a taxi. Maybe he should return inside, ask the barkeep for a number. Maybe use his phone, try to solve the problem in the contemporary fashion.

Will hitches up his pants, takes stock. Although he wouldn’t call himself drunk, he’s definitely not sober.

A trio of young men round the corner, turn onto his street, and seem to notice him.

Will is ready for this, he thinks. He’s been training, he’s in good shape. Maybe he’s even looking for it.

NEW YORK CITY

After the two days at the camp in Virginia, Will had come home with the very beginnings of fresh skill sets, both of which needed a lot of additional work. So the plan was to continue to run Will through his paces, practicing surveillance and countersurveillance on the streets of the city, early mornings and lunchtimes and the occasional fallow stretch of afternoon, following random passersby, rabbit moves and leapfrogging and route recon, observed closely by Elle and Roger, then debriefed in the secluded booths of greasy spoons and shot-and-a-beer bars.

“What about firearms?” he asked Elle.

“What about them?” She dipped a French fry into a gravy boat. Will had never witnessed anyone order fries with gravy on the side, a bowl of brown gloop with a ladle.

“When will I get a gun?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind? I certainly hope you never get a gun. There are already far too many guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. Almost all guns, in fact.”

Will didn’t have a rational rebuttal at the ready. He didn’t disagree.

“You don’t know how to use a pistol, do you? And you can’t take one abroad. So the only thing any type of firearm is going to get you is in trouble, or shot. If you really feel the need to accomplish either of those things, just let me know, I’ll take care of it for you.”

Will let it drop.

At lunchtime the next day, he practiced a surveillance-detection route, unsupervised, unmonitored, on his own. He headed west, in fits and starts and double-backs, through lobbies and tunnels and big crowds and empty stretches, out past the tall modernist office buildings, out past the theaters, out past the tenements, all the way to one of the last forlorn plots of Manhattan real estate, where a dilapidated warehouse loomed next to a chaotic taxi garage.

A uniformed security guard sat in front of a tiny fan, dozing. Will walked past him, climbed two very long sets of steep steps. He pushed open a heavy steel door.

A man was waiting in the big open space. The floors were covered in mats, the walls padded.

“Hi, I’m Will.”

The man extended his hand for a bone-crushing shake. “Frank.” He took Will’s measure without any pretense of hiding it. “So you wanna be trained in mixed martial arts, huh?”

“That’s right.” Will had called earlier, from the communal phone in the archive room.

“Okay.” Nodding, but not really in agreement. “Why?”

“I want to be a little less bad at defending myself.”

DUBLIN

The pub is behind Will, fifty yards; the menacing trio is in front, seventy-five. Will still has the option of turning around, fleeing back into the safety of the crowd, tail between legs. But maybe the pub is where the young men are going. Or even if not, maybe they’ll follow him in, smelling his fear, tasting his blood.

No. He won’t back down, not from this.

He walks toward them, muscles tensing, senses sharpened. He smells their cigarette smoke wafting on the wind, hears a cough. He looks at the cougher, just a kid really, skinny and pimply, and he realizes they’re all kids, teenagers or even tweens, nervous, maybe they snuck out with stolen cigarettes, trying it out, coughing, giggling, worried about getting caught.

“Good evening, sir,” one says when they pass, giving Will ample berth, a grown man emerging from a pub, late at night on a dark street.

Will had misunderstood. They’re afraid of him.

NEW YORK CITY

Gabriella sets off on a reverse immigration from the Upper East Side, like
The Jeffersons
going back in time, leaving the de luxe apartment in the sky, an apartment that Terrance found by the happenstance of family connections, a short-term deal turned into a long-term steal, surrounded by all these upright citizens, their well-dressed kids and well-groomed dogs, not a choke-collared pit bull among them. The only other non-Caucasian in the building is a beautiful and always put-together dark-skinned African-American woman whom Gabriella thinks of as Black Barbie. It appears that Gabriella and Black Barbie have tacitly agreed to not be friends, not wanting to give the appearance of forming any sort of minority alliance.

Over on the Lexington Avenue local, the crowd is mostly blacks and Hispanics coming down from Harlem and the Bronx. At Union Square Gabriella transfers to the L train in a swarm of the North Brooklyn crowd, the college-degreed kids, who all get off within a few stops, most of them immediately in Williamsburg but the younger, more tattooed ones in Bushwick.

Then out past all the gentrification and pioneering, the subway rumbles through one slum after another, graffiti on the station walls, the stench of urine when the doors open, busted overhead lights, the ever present possibility of malevolence amid all this malignant neglect, where the real-estate stock is unredeemed and unredeemable—housing projects and six-story apartment buildings with trash-strewn concrete courtyards, abandoned buildings alongside empty lots filled with junk and junkies, police-cruiser lights flashing and engines revving as the sedans race between disaster and tragedy, cops getting out warily, hands on holsters.

The voyage can last as long as ninety minutes door-to-door, longer to ride the subway to Canarsie than to fly to D.C. She brings a sheaf of reading material with her, usually the unmanageable pile of the Sunday
Times
, and she settles in.

Her mother’s apartment—the apartment Gabriella and her sister grew up in—is the second floor of an aluminum-sided house with a brick stoop, one bathroom and two small bedrooms, the four of them living in nine hundred square feet for her entire childhood. Dinner is rice and beans, curried oxtail stew, a visit from her Grandmother Teresa with her diabetes and arthritis, also the onset of dementia, referring to Gabriella with a name to which she hasn’t answered in fifteen years.

“Please Abuela,” she says, in her most patient voice, “call me Gabriella.”

“But your name is
Crystal
.” A confused look on Teresa’s face, trying to understand.

“Not anymore, Abuela.” She ditched that stripper name when she went to college, started using her middle name, her paternal grandmother’s. Gabriella shed her original skin layer by layer, first her name and then her clothes, her accent and her music, her attitude and her outlook, trying to stand out less dramatically from the other New York girls on campus.