The Travelers (4 page)
Will glances down, another hand-delivery to someone in a different country, a red
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
stamp.
A year ago, when Malcolm first handed him such an envelope, Will asked what it was.
“You see that stamp there?” Malcolm responded. “
Personal and confidential,
addressed to someone who’s not you?”
“Yeah.”
“That means it’s
personal
and it’s
confidential
, for someone who’s
not you
.”
“Gotcha.”
“You remember the Sony hack, Rhodes? The Office of Personnel Management? JPMorgan Chase?
Snowden
? Digital information—digital communications—are as insecure as ever. So around here, we do things the old-fashioned way.” Malcolm tapped the envelope. “We send each other shitloads of paper.”
Since then Will had received plenty of these envelopes to tote overseas, as well as more than a few for himself: personnel memos and payroll forms and health-insurance paperwork and workplace-law notices and legal waivers.
“Listen, I need to jump on a call, so go.” Malcolm makes the shooing motion. “Get the fuck out.”
Will stands, strides across the big office, reaches for the doorknob.
“And hey, Rhodes?”
Will turns back.
“Let’s be careful out there.”
FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA
The room is the size of a basketball court but with the ceiling height of a coat closet, low and claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit and gray-carpeted, flimsy upholstered chest-high dividers separating the cubicles, nearly a hundred workspaces in here, all with laminate desktops and gooseneck lamps and plastic-and-mesh chairs on casters that glide across the pieces of hardened rubber that sit on the floor to make it easy to roll around, but no more than a foot or two in any direction, because these are small cubicles.
Every cheap desktop has a computer with a twenty-three-inch monitor. Every low-end plastic chair has an occupant. There are no vacancies, nor is there space to hire more personnel, even though more would be welcome—this is a round-the-clock operation with three shifts every day including weekends and holidays, never a moment when it’s acceptable for the lights to be out.
The demographic is primarily South Asian, male, mid-twenties to late thirties, earning from eleven to nineteen dollars per hour. On the higher end, in a cubicle identical to all the others, Raji notices an incoming alert pop up, one of a dozen that he receives daily about the travel details of any of the fifteen hundred individuals on his segment of the watch list.
Raji copies the information into the relevant windows at the prompts:
U.S. passport number: 11331968
Flight: 19 JFK to CDG
Ticket category: B11
Seat: 12A
Alert code: 4
He hits Post, then returns his attention to his bag of barbecue potato chips.
NEW YORK CITY
“
My
man,” Reggie says, wearing the same ear-to-ear grin as ever. Will has never seen the old guy in a bad mood, and Reggie has been working curbside check-in for decades.
“Where you off to this time, 007?” Reggie likes to kid that Will isn’t a writer, he’s a spy; that his magazine byline is just a cover. Over the years, Reggie hasn’t been the only person to have made this tongue-in-cheek accusation.
“It’s France this time, Reggie.”
“Ooh-la-la.” The two men bump fists.
Will reaches into his pocket, removes the gift-wrapped box. “For Aisha. It’s a few of those chocolates she loves.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
“Happy to. Plus, I got them for free!” He didn’t. “How’s she doing this week?”
“Better, thank you.”
Will nods. “Please tell her happy birthday for me.”
“I will, Mr. Bond.” Reggie winks. “You have a good trip.”
Will doesn’t understand how someone with such a crappy job can enjoy it so much, or can pretend so convincingly. But then again, there’s a lot about normal forty-hour-per-week jobs that Will doesn’t understand. He has barely ever had one.
In the terminal, Will examines himself in a mirror, surrounded by all this corporate signage, Kimberly-Clark and American Standard, Rubbermaid and Purell, a barrage of brands. He himself is a brand too, Will Rhodes, Travel Writer, with his little suede notebook, his canvas sport jacket over oxford shirt and knit tie, twill pants, rubber-soled brogues, sturdy comfortable clothes that won’t wrinkle or crease or collect lint or stains, none that’ll look any worse for wear after twenty hours hanging off his lanky frame, flying across the ocean.
After takeoff he washes down his sleeping pill with a whiskey. He reclines his seat, inserts the ear plugs, and stretches the mask over his eyes, a well-rehearsed routine. Almost immediately, he falls into an innocent sleep.
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
Will doesn’t know how long he’s been out—ten minutes? three hours?—when a loud rumble wakes him, the shuddering of the 747, the vibration traveling up his thighs and tailbone through his spine.
He pushes down his mask, unplugs his ears. Turns to the man-child next to him, a thirty-year-old wearing high-topped sneakers and a backward baseball cap who’d been preoccupied with a lollipop and a video game when Will last looked.
“What’s happening?” Will asks.
The guy looks ashen, eyes wide, mouth agape. Shakes his head.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please ensure that your seatbelts are
securely
fastened, and all trays are in their upright position.”
These are the same words Will has heard hundreds of times before. Sit back relax and enjoy the flight. We know you have your choice of carriers. Our first priority is your safety. We’d like to extend a special welcome…
A flight attendant hurries past, gripping each seatback tightly as she passes, banging her knee into the frontmost armrest, pausing to gather her balance and her wits before launching herself across the open purchase-less space to a jump seat, which she falls onto, buckles herself in, pulling the straps tight, taking a deep breath.
Oxygen masks fall from their overhead doors, and an audible wave of panic ripples down the fuselage. Will places the mask over his face, and tries as instructed to breathe normally, pinned under gathering terror to the soft leather of seat 12A.
The plane plummets.
People start to scream.
NEW YORK CITY
Malcolm walks the perimeter of the thirtieth floor, looking for any last stragglers who might interrupt him. Everyone still here is too junior, and none would have the nerve to barge in on the chief at seven-thirty, except the food editor, the guy everyone calls Veal Parmesan. Veal never seems to leave. But he also never visits Malcolm.
Malcolm closes his door, turns the knob to lock it. He takes a few steps along the wall that’s decorated with framed
Travelers
covers, decades’ worth of the magazine’s best work, like a museum exhibit for the people who traipse through this office regularly.
He squats in the corner of the bookshelves, pushes aside a handful of old guidebooks, reaches his hand past the books, all the way to the back wall. He locates a button by touch, and presses it.
For a few decades, this was the only security mechanism. But during a wave of paranoia in the post-Nixon seventies, the new editor-in-chief Jonathan Mongeleach was convinced to add a second level of security. In the eighties this analog lock was replaced by an electronic device, then over the past two decades by ever more sophisticated digital models, with increasing frequency of upgrades, as strongly advised by the consultants and developers who never fail to push each year’s advance as an exponential technological leap, last year’s security laughably outdated this year. Or so claimed by the people who profit from the technology, with no practical way for any of its consumers to assess the claim, least of all Malcolm. What a racket.
So now this mechanical button is merely a secondary system. Malcolm activates the primary system via a hidden panel at chest height, behind a big thick reference book, using his thumbprint and the input of a long access code.
With a nearly silent click, the entire section of bookcase is released. The wall swivels open a couple of inches of its own accord, on sturdy brass hinges; this is a heavy section of wall, hundreds of pounds. Malcolm pulls it open wide enough to walk through. Then he closes the door behind him, and disappears into the wall.
PARIS
The big man’s phone dings in his pocket, the sound reserved for actionable alerts. The message had been encrypted on another continent, then decoded by a complex proprietary app that gets updated regularly. He seems to spend half his life waiting for his devices to update, plugged into outlets and the Internet,
Updating…Please wait…Updating…
He walks through the dimly lit shabby-swanky bar of a four-star hotel in the 2
ème
that’s frequented by international businessmen and high-end hookers, which is why he’s here, looking for a blue-eyed blonde to fulfill a recurring fantasy that he’s been unable to shake while spending copious time in the professional company of a blue-eyed blonde, sometimes even talking with her about sex, God help him. He steps outside to the deserted boulevard, and places a call to that same blonde, who at the moment is lying in bed in a marginally seedy hotel in downtown Bordeaux, reading Robert Hughes’s book about Australia.
“Yes?” she answers, putting down a glass of room-temperature mineral water. Her hair is in curlers, her face slathered with a mud mask. She’s doing everything she can do tonight to look as good as she can look tomorrow. Except being asleep. It’s very late.
“He’s airborne,” the man says. “You ready?”
She sighs. This is a stupid question, requiring either a stupid answer or rudeness. “As ready as I’ll ever be, Roger.”
“You’re going to be great.” He probably thinks he’s being reassuring, but he doesn’t have any idea how to help her. This is not something he’ll ever experience or understand, not remotely. Of all the crappy things she has already done in her life, this is going to be a new one.
“Just great,” he reiterates, one of those meaningless phrases of pat encouragement that pass for supportiveness.
She puts down the phone, and puts down the book, and stares at the ceiling, hoping she can fall asleep.
NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN
As suddenly as it started, the unexpected turbulence subsides, then disappears entirely, then the plane is once again cruising smoothly thirty-six thousand feet above the ocean, hundreds of miles in any direction from the nearest land, in the dead middle of the night.
It had lasted only a few seconds, the feeling that he was about to die. Maybe a half-minute, not very long at all. But long enough for Will to discover something about himself that he wished he hadn’t.
PARIS
In the misty morning, Will walks past the Louvre into the fog-shrouded Tuileries, young mothers with babies, old men with newspapers, the people who sit in parks on weekday mornings, the same everywhere. He exits at Concorde and continues up the Champs-Élysées, toward l’Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower off to the left. A greatest-hits album.
“Excusez-moi,
monsieur.”
An old man is blocking Will’s path, holding out a piece of paper, a haphazardly folded map. There’s a woman by his side, a stern, disappointed-looking wife.
“Je cherche le café qui s’appelle Le Fouquet’s. Est-ce que vous le connaissez?”
People are constantly asking Will for directions in places he doesn’t live, and he often knows the answer. The people who are doing the asking are almost always tourists, asking about tourist destinations. People like this man, speaking French with a Russian accent.
“Oui.”
Will points toward the famous arch.
“Là-bas.”
“Merci, monsieur. Vous êtes très gentil.”
Since childhood Will has been an obsessive student of maps, memorizing streets and lakes, inventing routes to Tierra del Fuego and the North Pole, filling his wall-mounted world map with pushpins in a color-coded system to divide natural wonders from man-made attractions, the places he had already been from the ones he wanted to see.
Past the Grand Palais, Will turns off the boulevard, and the traffic and noise fall away in the quiet elegance of the 8
ème
, barely any sidewalk on this street. Will is tired and distracted and not attentive enough, walking too close to the curb, and when a car approaches he needs to jump to the side, to flatten himself against the coarse stone for the Peugeot to wheeze by, the driver’s arm resting on the open window, just a few inches away. Will could reach out and steal the guy’s watch.
Will turns one corner and another without needing to consult the burgundy
plan
that’s tucked into his back pocket. He finally stops at an elegant Belle Epoque building,
TRAVELERS
etched on a brass plaque, scratched and tarnished, an old piece of identification that had been affixed to this exposed expanse of limestone wall a half-century ago.
It’s well known in the
Travelers
family that Paris was the very first overseas bureau, an experiment in a boutique high-end travel agency that surprised everyone with its success. At its height, in the mid-nineties, the magazine operated nearly three dozen overseas bureaus, all of them part travel agency and part magazine outpost, providing New York with local editorial talent and also attracting advertisers and promotional opportunities.
The past decade has been kind to neither type of business. But in an age when all magazines are casting about for new revenue sources—festivals and conferences, apparel lines and home-decorating services—
Travelers
is the trailblazer, the first to extend its brand recognition and consumer loyalty into a completely different business.
And some of the travel bureaus are still profitable. Even at ten on a weekday morning, the ground-floor office in Paris is open for business, albeit with only a skeleton crew. One adviser is seated at her desk, directly behind the plate-glass window, holding up
Le Monde
with perfectly manicured hands. There aren’t many customers at this early hour. But extended hours is one of the services that
Travelers
offers in places like Paris.
Will isn’t here to visit the travel bureau.
He pushes a plain key card—no markings, just a magnetic strip on a blank white card—flat up against a reader. The front door unlocks with a nearly inaudible click. He climbs the sweeping staircase to the
premier étage
, eighteen-foot ceilings, marble floors, an oversize brass knob set into the middle of the towering double doors.
Will has no idea what goes on in the rest of this building. He has seen a few people coming or going, but there are no other plaques on doors, no signage of any sort anywhere, no indication of any other place of work.
He depresses a button on the office door. A soft whoosh as a waist-high panel opens in the wall. He swipes his ID card through a slit, and another door clicks open.
Will walks into the Paris bureau, one very large room that’s shared, in the abstract, by two people. Today it’s the young French woman; at other times it’s the middle-aged American man. Will has never seen both at the same time. He vastly prefers Inez, with her scarves and freckles and wide-set deer-in-the-headlights eyes.
“Bonjour, Monsieur Rhodes. Comment ça-va?”
“Ça va bien, Inez. Et toi?”
He removes the envelope from his jacket, hands it over.
“Pas mal.”
She takes the envelope.
“Et merci.”
Inez punches in the six-digit touch-tone code that unlocks a cabinet drawer, a handful of audio frequencies. The lock’s notes are barely audible, but they definitely remind Will of something, a melody, maybe the theme of some song his band used to cover. It bothers him that he can’t place it, feels like this might be the onset of memory decay; hearing loss and erectile dysfunction can’t be far behind.
It’s now Inez’s turn to remove a file from this drawer, then an envelope from the file. The overseas bureaus were founded well before the advent of computers and the Internet, and their paper filing system functions perfectly. Every few years someone new proposes a digital overhaul, and the editor rejects it.
Will takes a seat, slices the envelope with a letter opener, sharper than it needs to be, dangerous. He removes a few sheets of paper, runs his eyes down one page. He looks at some six-by-nine glossy photos. Then a couple of maps, which he will study closely, memorizing the major routes, identifying the locations of his destinations, familiarizing himself with the names of streets and parks, beaches and museums, towns and villages and mountain ranges. Whenever Will arrives somewhere, he wants to already know where he’s going.
“These are all new notes?”
“Oui. Je croix que c’est vrai.”
“Some of this looks familiar. Are you sure?”
“You know quite well, Monsieur Rhodes, that I am not.”
The girl doesn’t know anything; she never does. “Ah!” she says, finger up. She unlocks another drawer, and hands over a bulky nylon bag.
Will takes the packet, unzips it, peeks inside.
“Merci, mademoiselle, comme toujours.”
“De rien, Monsieur Rhodes.”
He spends a long day scouting, hopping on and off the Metro, into cafés for fortifying espressos while scribbling notes. He takes a late-afternoon shower, puts on fresh clothes, exits the hotel between a pair of potted topiaries complemented by a pair of burly doormen who could be either welcoming or the opposite.
A woman is emerging from a long black Mercedes in a miasma of perfume and hair spray and shopping bags, like an ultra-
riche
Pigpen. She gives Will a once-over, then lowers her sunglasses, extends her legs from a Chanel skirt to the rue St-Honoré. She glides into the hotel, another successful afternoon of shopping accomplished, and now to a deep bubble bath with a glass of chilled Sancerre and a home-décor magazine, a nibbled dinner at L’Arpège, an eau-de-vie nightcap, and finally a deeply gratifying earthmoving fuck with her handsome jet-setting husband…
Maybe not. Maybe that’s merely the mythical version of her life that Will is conjuring so he can try to sell it, the type of fantasy he attempts to invent every time he sits down to type, to project unto readers the striving and yearning, and hopefully the transference from the unattainable fantasy of this woman’s life to a more attainable, less fictional one, relatable to a woman who lives in a big house in North Indianapolis, a woman who isn’t coming to Paris on a shopping spree but nevertheless can purchase the handbag that’s advertised on page 89, facing Will’s byline, a handbag that any woman can find at any upscale mall in America, and perhaps pretend that she bought it here, on the rue St-Honoré, and hung in the crook of her arm as she strode to her prime-time table on the rue de Varenne.
Most of the time, it goes unsaid. But Will is always aware that at the end of the day,
Travelers
is in business to sell that handbag to that reader.
He takes a circuit of Plâce Vendôme, mostly to see if anything has changed, but nothing ever does, except the progress of the Ritz’s renovations. He makes his way over to Palais-Royal, and strolls the seventeenth-century arcades, poking in boutiques, antiques and leather goods and artisan jewelry. He buys a tee shirt for Chloe, with the picture of a terrier whose name apparently is Gigi. His wife is fond of terriers. Though not quite fond enough to own one; Chloe doesn’t think she’d be a good parent to a dog.
There are a handful of wine bars strewn about the northern end of Palais-Royal, and he has a glass of white with appetizers at one, an airy room with light wood and big windows. He walks around the corner to a smaller, more crowded
bar à vins
, a place he’s been before. He watches the crowd through the huge mirror while he eats spicy lamb stew and drinks a barnyardy red, perched on a leather stool at the battered bar, scribbling in the suede-covered notebook he bought in Florence, pliable and worn and filled with notes he has scrawled on all seven continents. It’s a perfect little thing, his notebook.
The lamb stew is nearly flawless—marginally overseasoned—as is the room, dark and intimate, walls lined with a diagonal zigzag of wooden shelving that holds hundreds of bottles, and worn leather, and bare wood tables with mismatched hotel flatware, and scratchy old jazz on a turntable that gets jostled once in a while, a screech and a skip, customers straightening their spines, but it’s part of the thing, the ethos.