The Expats (18 page)

“I forgot my keys, by mistake,” Kate said. “I didn’t spit in your eye, on purpose.”

A book sat on the bedside table near the used pillow, a paperback with a simple cover depicting farmland, a female author, the words a novel under a long, vague title; chick lit. A water glass. A tissue box. Lip balm.

It was Julia who was sleeping here, in this bed that was not in the master bedroom.

“I’m about to walk out,” Dexter said, “to a meeting.”

The desk was small, tidy. The laptop was closed; there were no readable papers lying around, other than a couple envelopes, addressed to a street in Limpertsberg and to an entity called WJM, S.A. This was a
société anonyme
, similar to the
société à responsibilité limitée
, which was continental for
Ltd
. This, she assumed, was William J. Maclean, Inc.

There was a file drawer, but no way that Kate could chance opening it; that would be impossible to explain, if she got caught.

The peripheral device was a big affair, a scanner and photocopier and printer all-in-one. There was a small pile of business cards on the desk. Kate pulled a handkerchief out of her jeans and used it to shuffle through the cards, her fingers not touching the stack of paper. One of them was for a tennis club; Julia didn’t play tennis. Kate plucked this one out with the hankie, slid the card into her pocket.

“I understand, Dex, and I’m sorry.”

She walked to the bedside table, safely out of Julia’s sight. She used the handkerchief to pick up the lip balm and drop it in with the pilfered business card.

Kate wondered if this was an unhappy marriage, or if Julia was a standard-issue insomniac, or if she had a cold and didn’t want to disturb her husband last night.

Or if this was something far less ordinary.

“AND DEXTER WILL be late,” Kate said. “He’s always late returning from meetings; somehow, everything takes longer than he expects it to. So we don’t need to be back till one.”

“Okay.” Julia called out from the bathroom, where she was fixing her makeup. Kate knew Julia well enough to know that she never left the house without looking as perfect as she could.

Kate wandered over to the windows that faced the palace. The flagpole was flagless; no royalty in residence. The yard was empty of vehicles. A single guard stood at the back gate, weapon resting on his shoulder, bored. This window was certainly a great vantage.

But the crucial thing, Kate knew, was being able to get out. Just like a bank robbery, or an extramarital affair: getting in is the easy part.

“So shall we?” They were headed to a mall, to while away the morning.

“We shall.” Kate pushed a small button on her watch, and walked away from the window on the rue de l’Eau, out the apartment door, into the tiny elevator, and six levels down, into the garage, where they climbed into Julia’s Mercedes, and exited onto a different street, the rue du St-Esprit, a narrow cobblestone lane that was a few confusing turns away from the
palais
, and after fifty yards St-Esprit made a dramatic ninety-degree turn on a steep descent before dead-ending into the equally narrow cobblestoned lane called rue Large, which climbed steeply through a medieval arch before ending at rue Sigefroi, which a couple seconds later merged into the Montée du Clausen, aka local route 1, a road that would soon present the choice of speeding away at a hundred kilometers per hour along every point of the compass, to Germany or France, to the airport or the countryside, to anywhere.

Kate checked her watch: under two minutes from the window to unimpeded freedom.

They were foreign nationals, bearing false names, living across the street from a target-rich environment, with a vantage that couldn’t be clearer, an escape that couldn’t be quicker.

This was just circumstantial evidence, Kate knew. And maybe she wasn’t even genuinely suspicious. Maybe she’d tricked herself into
suspicion so she’d have an excuse to investigate them. To have something to do. Anything.

She was having a hard time distinguishing among the levels of implausibility of various scenarios that were floating around the murky swamp of her imagination. On the one hand, it seemed highly unlikely—it seemed nearly outrageous—that a hit-man team would come to Luxembourg to assassinate someone. She couldn’t deny that. But she also couldn’t dismiss this as a rational explanation for why a pair of people with secret identities would rent a flat that would allow such an ideal opportunity on assassinate-able characters.

Other scenarios revolved around flight. But could these people really be fugitives?

Or of course the worst-case scenario: could they be in Luxembourg for Kate?

Only a single thread of her past could extend to the present, reaching out across five years and the Atlantic to yank her back, to wrap itself around her neck and strangle her.

Kate had always known that she hadn’t heard the last about Eduardo Torres. There were loose ends, unanswered questions; there was evidence. Plus no one had ever unearthed Torres’s fortune, which was widely believed to be tens of millions of dollars. The money was assumed to be squirreled away in a European numbered account.

And here Kate was, newly retired before forty, living in the world headquarters of numbered accounts, with a husband who was an unparalleled expert in the security of numbered accounts.

Kate looked awfully suspicious.

But so did Bill and Julia. She needed to dig deeper.

12

It was lightly drizzling, or misting, or whatever it’s called when minuscule bits of water, too fine to feel distinct drops, are drifting down out of the sky.

The wipers were on their slowest setting. Three seconds between swipes, during which the windshield clouded up, became almost too wet to see through, and then
swoosh
, clear again.

The ignition was ignited, the headlights lit, the tuner tuned to France Culture. Kate was having a tough time following the thread of the talk radio. The general subject seemed to be Baudelaire. Or at least
Baudelaire
was the word she recognized, repeated over and over. Or it could’ve been
beau de l’aire
they were talking about, perhaps some type of beautiful atmosphere. Which was sort of the opposite of Baudelaire.

A business card from a podiatrist was posed in the passenger seat. She could claim that she was early to her appointment. She’d say she had maybe a heel spur, wherein her heel hurt, but there was no exterior evidence that any non-physician could visually check. So she was sitting in her warm and dry car, trying to learn French by radio osmosis, listening to impassioned academics wage the obscure but apparently permanent Baudelaire war—what were the sides? what were the issues?—while she waited for whatever half-hour-on-the-dot was next. That’s when her pretend appointment was.

No, she would answer, she had no idea that Bill’s office was here. How could she? She’d memorized this address from the envelopes in his guest room.

Tall stone town houses were flush up against the sidewalk, with almost-gardens in front, tiny patches of grass, the stray denuded shrub. The buildings were gray or tan or putty; the sidewalk was paved in light
gray concrete, the street in dark gray asphalt. The cars were shades of silver and gray and sometimes black; the sky a sodden slate. It was a colorless landscape, washed out by rain and the expectation of it, designed and constructed to match the dismal weather.

Kate had been sitting there for nearly an hour, and she still had more than three hours before she needed to be on her way to pick up the children. Three hours, and no one would know what she was doing, or where she was doing it, or for the love of God why.

Unless someone had tampered with her car, and for example installed a battery-operated GPS transmitter in the hollow under the supple gray leather of the passenger seat.

Bill emerged at 11:40. He looked both ways before descending the small staircase to the sidewalk. He had changed into tennis clothes, white shorts and a warm-up jacket with red and blue racing stripes down the sleeves. In this cold rain he looked comically incongruous, a Monty Python skit.

He hustled to his tidy little BMW, a plaything of a car. He gunned the engine, shifting gears aggressively, tearing through the quiet streets, on his way to a twelve o’clock court in Bel-Air. And then lunch. All with Dexter.

It had been Julia’s suggestion, proffered to Kate—“Don’t you think they should play during the day? So they could be with us at night?”—who in turn had passed it to Dexter. “It will do you good,” Kate had said, “to get some exercise.” In Washington, Dexter had exercised in the evenings. But now he was usually working after dark. And when he didn’t need to be working, Kate wanted him home, with the children. With her.

That’s how it came to pass that Kate had two luxurious hours when she knew Bill would not be in his office, at this building. So she waited another five minutes, to make sure he hadn’t forgotten his water bottle or can of balls, his cell phone or knee brace, anything; then she waited an extra five, just to be extra-sure. And to procrastinate.

She glanced at herself in the sun-visor mirror.

This was a bizarre moment: this crossing-over from a hypothetical plan to a concrete caper, giving in to what may turn out to be an utterly outlandish idea, possibly letting go of some important tether to sanity. Deciding yes: I will do this. But not deciding it 100 percent, because that would be admitting too much to herself, about herself, that she didn’t want to admit. But deciding it 95 percent, enough to take the possibly outlandish action, but not enough to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this wasn’t just a goof, a lark, but an actual non-insane plan.

Kate pulled the brim of her new rubberized yellow rain cap as low as it would go. Her normal cap, bought in Copenhagen a month ago, was a vivid multicolor. There was a lot of attractive foul-weather gear in Scandinavia; there was a lot of foul weather. But today’s cap was a cheap something she bought yesterday, at a discount store in Gare. She would throw it away later today.

She picked up the envelope from the passenger seat, and wrote Bill’s building address on it; inside was a special offer from a bicycle shop, a 20 percent discount on any bike. She’d picked up this flyer at the bike shop yesterday, when she was still debating this possibly insane plan.

She got out of the car, tugged on her leather gloves, and walked across the street.

Of the five buzzers, the fifth was unlabeled. The first had a Luxembourgeois or German name; the second an easily pronounced French name, Dupuis; the third was Underwood. The fourth read
WJM, S.A
.

She wrote
Underwood
on the envelope.

She rang Bill’s bell. If someone unexpectedly answered, she’d claim she was looking for Underwood. But the only other activity she’d seen of this building was a dowager who’d left at eleven, carrying a folded-up shopping bag, and returned an hour later with the same bag, now looking far heavier than possible, the old woman listing to one side, tottering under the weight. Kate had watched her struggle up the slope of the street, an interminable climb, while the woman’s mouth constantly moved, her lips pursing, her cheeks dimpling: the contortions of a native French speaker, keeping the facial muscles toned for all those nasal vowels that can be properly pronounced only with strong lips. This must have been Mme. Dupuis.

Kate rang again. There didn’t seem to be any security cameras here at this door. But these days, cameras could be anywhere. She kept her eyes well below the brim of the cap.

She rang Dupuis.

“Booooooooon-jourrrrrrr!”
Yes, that was the voice of the old lady.

“Bonjour, madame,”
Kate answered.
“J’ai une lettre pour Underwood, mais il ne repond pas. La lettre, elle est très importante.”

“Ouuuuiiiiii, mademoisselllllllllle.”

The old woman buzzed. Kate pushed open the windowed door, then let it swing shut of its own accord; it closed with a noticeable rattling of the window.

Kate climbed the stairs, turned a corner, and saw Mme. Dupuis waiting at her door.

“Merci, madame,”
Kate said.

“De rien, mademoisselllllllllle. Au deuxième étagggggggge.”

Kate climbed to the second floor, pushed the envelope under the Underwood door, then hustled down the stairs. She opened the front door, let it rattle closed. But she stayed inside. She stood still for a minute. Then she crept back up the stairs.

As she was rounding the corner toward the second flight, she heard voices, a man and a woman.
Damn
. Kate spun her head around: nowhere to hide. She could run to the basement, but what if they were going down to the garage? If there’s one thing Kate didn’t want, it was to be caught hiding.

She would bluff her way past them. She turned the corner, and started climbing the stairs. As the couple turned into the stairwell, Kate glanced up, feigning surprise, smiling.
“Bonjour,”
she said.

“Bonjour,”
the man said. He was echoed quietly by the woman. The pair waited at the top of the narrow stairwell, allowing Kate to pass.