The Expats (22 page)

“I have to.”

He stared at her, waiting for her to elaborate. But she waited him out.

“Okay.” Hayden reached into his pocket, removed the photo, and handed it back to her. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I’m sure you understand.”

Kate was expecting this. Hayden had become an important person in Europe; he couldn’t afford to walk down blind alleys.

The hat-wearing man was now in a different adjoining gallery, his back still to them. Kate took a couple steps around the perimeter of the room, trying to get a look at his face.

“How long are you in München?”

They walked into the next gallery, passing the young family and their security-guard escort. Hayden stopped in front of a Rembrandt. Kate looked around but didn’t see the fedora’d stranger. And then she did, in the adjoining room.

“We’re leaving the day after tomorrow,” she said. “We’re going to Bamberg for a day, then home. Back to Lux.”

“
Beau
tiful little city. You’d love Bamberg. But.”

She turned to him. “Yes?”

“Instead you could go to Berlin. To see a guy.”

THE MAN IN the next room was edging closer, now in a position that seemed an awful lot like he was trying to listen to their conversation.

Kate widened her eyes at Hayden, and inclined her head toward the adjoining gallery. Hayden understood, gave Kate a nod. He quickly
glided to the wall, his soles falling silent on the floor, his body springing into tightly controlled, elegant action. Standing stock-still, in his foppish clothes and fussy hair, Hayden had looked like any other middle-aged man. But something else was visible in his gait, in the way he waved his arm to point at a painting. Like Travolta, near-dancing in
Pulp Fiction
, the coiled energy visible just below the surface. Now, sprung into action, Hayden was singularly spry. He slid into the next large gallery, while Kate hustled to the smaller one.

She saw nothing. Kate looked both ways down the long hall, windows on one side, unseen galleries on the other.

No one.

She started walking. In the next gallery she glimpsed Hayden in the adjoining large one, the two of them making parallel pushes, pursuing, flushing.

But still no one.

Kate sped up, now hearing the sound of the French schoolboys, and she caught a flash of an overcoat sweeping through a door, and the Japanese startled at Hayden rushing past, but no sign of the overcoat, and Kate moved faster now, the building coming to an end, the top of the stairs, she turned a corner and looked down—

There he was, taking the last few steps at the bottom of the sweeping staircase, turning the corner, his coat trailing after him.

Kate and Hayden ran down the stairs, a security guard yelling at them—
Halt!
—and turned the corner and descended more stairs and another corner and then the lobby was spread out below them, and they froze, breathing heavy.

They were looking at a huge room that they’d last seen empty. It was now packed, the population of multiple tour buses disgorged here, hundreds of people in coats and hats, buying tickets and queuing for the coat check, seated on benches and standing.

Kate scanned the crowd, walking slowly to change her vantage, Hayden strolling in the opposite direction. They descended the steps at opposite sides of the room and waded through the crowd, retired Germans from the provinces, checked wool coats and loden pants and sheepy-looking scarves, beer on breath, hearty laughing and red cheeks and thin flyaway hair.

Kate caught a glimpse of something on the far side of the crowd, and she anxiously pushed her way through the thick humanity—“Excuse me,
bitte
, excuse me”—until she was at the glass front doors, watching the man in the flowing overcoat and brown fedora near the end of
the plaza as a car pulled to a stop in front of him. He climbed into the driver-side backseat, his face still turned away.

As the car pulled from the curb, the driver turned toward the museum for a split second before returning her eyes forward to her route in the Theresienstraße. It was a woman wearing big sunglasses.

The car was a hundred yards away, and the light was dim, but still Kate was pretty sure that the driver was Julia.

“IT SEEMS LIKE we should go,” Kate said. “When’s the next time we’re going to be this far east?” They were walking through the Englischer Garten in the failing light, a landscape of browns and grays, an infinitely intricate latticework of leafless branches silhouetted against the silvery sky. “Otherwise, we’ll have to fly. And let’s face it, we’re not going to buy four plane tickets to Berlin.”

“But then why wasn’t Berlin a part of our original itinerary?” Dexter asked, fairly.

Frozen grass crunched underfoot. The boys were scouring the ground for acorns, which they were shoving into their pockets. It was some sort of competition. “I wasn’t looking at the whole of Germany.”

“I have to work on Monday.”

“But you can do that from Berlin, right?”

Dexter ignored her rebuttal. “And this’ll be another two days of missed school. You know I don’t like that.”

They walked down a swale and up again, Kate’s feet slipping in the slick piles of leaves. “I do know that,” she said. “And I agree. But this is preschool.”

“For Ben. But it’s kindergarten for Jake.”

Kate glared at him. Did Dexter imagine she didn’t actually know what grade Jake was in? She struggled to ignore the condescending remark; a fight would be counterproductive. She answered as levelly as she could, “I know.” Her breath emerged in big white puffs in the cold dry air. “But this is why we wanted to live in Europe. For us and for the kids: to go everywhere, see everything. So let’s see Berlin. Jake can get back to his ABCs on Wednesday.”

Kate knew that she didn’t have a moral leg to stand on. Her position was indefensible, and she hated defending it, pretending that something was for the children’s good when it was really just something she needed. Or just wanted. This was the specific type of dreadful feeling
that she’d hoped to avoid by quitting the Company. The exact type of lie for which she’d thrown over her career to not utter.

They paused at the edge of an iced-over pond, the shoreline buttressed by boulders, long low branches dipping down to rest on the glassy surface.

Dexter put his arm around Kate as they gazed at the serene, frigid tableau. They rubbed shoulders up and down for warmth. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to Berlin.”

KATE FORCED THE boys to pose at Checkpoint Charlie, in front of the
YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR
sign on Friedrichstraße. Kennedy was here in ’63, on the same visit that included his
“Ich bin ein Berliner”
speech, delivered down in Schöneberg. Then in ’87, up at the Brandenburg Gate, Reagan challenged Gorbachev to tear down this wall.

Americans liked to deliver bombastic speeches here in Berlin. Kate followed that tradition with an impassioned version of her stump, If You Don’t Start Behaving Right This Instant. It was probably the chocolate that was the culprit, she announced. So a solution could be that they never eat chocolate, ever again, in their entire lives.

Their eyes were wide with terror; Ben started to cry. Kate relented, as usual, with a variation on “That’s not what I
want
. So don’t make me do it.”

They quickly recovered, as they always did. She set them off into the undulating rows of monoliths of the Holocaust Memorial, thousands of concrete slabs, rising and falling. “If you come to a sidewalk,” she called out, “stop!”

The boys had no idea what this place was; there was no way she’d explain it.

Dexter was back at the hotel, wi-fi’d and caffeinated. Another man was suddenly beside her. “You have something for me,” he said in English. She was shocked to recognize him as the tweaked chauffeur who’d shuttled the family from the Frankfurt airport, their first day in Europe. Hayden had been keeping his eye on her, still. Maybe always. Upon reflection, this wasn’t so shocking.

Kate nodded at the man in recognition, and he returned the nod. She reached into her pocket, handed over the ziplock bag that contained a tube of lip balm and a business card from a tennis club, pilfered from the Macleans’ apartment.

“Same time tomorrow, north end of Kollwitzplatz, Prenzlauer Berg.”

Fifty yards ahead, Ben yelled, “Hi Mommy!”

She looked down the long row of slate-gray slabs, her little son dwarfed by the immense stone next to him. She waved, hand high in the air. “Okay,” she said, turning back to the man, who’d already vanished.

IT CONTINUED TO feel good, to be on this mission in Berlin. Even if there was a chance that the mission was entirely in her imagination. Maybe this was what had been missing in her life, why she felt so bored, so worthless, so unhappy.

But what mission did she want? Maybe she didn’t need the type with weapons and secret identities and coded calls and mortal peril. Maybe her family could be her mission. She could approach her children—their education, their diversions—as a job, as a problem to be solved. There was nothing standing in her way of making her life better, a nice normal life, helping with homework, turning her attention to
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, and mastering the art of French cooking.

But first, she still needed to find out who Julia and Bill were.

Kate stopped walking at the entrance to the playground in Kollwitzplatz. “I’m going to get a coffee,” she said to Dexter. “You want anything?”

“No thanks.”

She crossed the street and entered a café and took a seat away from the window. A harried-looking waitress hurried from the kitchen, her tray laden with food for a large, boisterous crowd in the corner. The door opened again, and the man came in. He sat across from Kate.

She gave him a once-over: a thirty-something in a scruffy beard and cowboy shirt and jeans and sneakers under a peacoat. Indistinguishable from the hipsters who lived in Austin and Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon or Maine. This was globalization: everyone everywhere was interchangeable. You could be anyone anywhere to do anything. This New Wave–loving, pill-popping, Williamsburg-looking van driver was a spy.