The Travelers (18 page)

“But I’m not in a foreign prison. And I haven’t done anything wrong.”

The man folds his hands on the table, leans forward. “Are you absolutely sure about that, Mr. Rhodes?”

STOCKHOLM

He wills himself to stay in his seat.

The young woman is dawdling out front, saying hello to someone who’s passing. The kids are running around a pole, singing a song, playing a game.

Joe beckons the waiter, puts money on the table, nervous, wanting to get the hell out of here.

Anders walks to his motorcycle. The woman turns, says something to Anders, who laughs. Fuck, this is no good, no good at all, they’re too close to each other, way too close.

Then suddenly one of her kids dashes up the block, and the other kid chases. Their mom yells but they don’t listen, so she smiles at Anders, shrugs, and runs away, all three family members with blond hair flowing, getting farther and farther from Anders, who watches her run, sitting on his motorcycle, she’s now sixty yards away, seventy, the kids are nearing this corner across from the café right here, it’s okay now, thank God, so the American stands, and takes a step away from his table, then another, and that’s when Anders turns his ignition key, and his motorcycle explodes.

NEW YORK CITY

It always takes much longer to come home than to leave, flying back from Europe to New York, westbound into the headwinds.

Will de-airplane-modes his phone, scans the screen for signs of crisis. He is now seeing his job—all jobs—from a new perspective on their fake urgency, their ersatz importance, their crucial bottom lines and make-or-break year-to-dates, their hairline-thin schedules and painstakingly reforecast budgets, their politics and infighting and competition, their charts and graphs and reports and memos, their hustle and bustle, their Kool-Aid passed around all the offices of all the world, this mass hallucination that what we do is important, that
we’re
important, no free time, not enough bandwidth, ask my assistant to check the schedule, let’s get on the calendar, I’ve just been so busy, you know how it is, absolutely, yes, do I ever.

He marches through the empty Global Entry lane at Immigration, bumps along the urban-blighty expanses between JFK and home, pulls to a stop in front of his house. While he was abroad the plywood had been removed from the windows, the new glass installed. His house no longer looks condemned.

Lights are on; Chloe is home.

Will trudges up the stoop, weary, none too keen to interact with his wife, to resume the barrage of lies he’s forced to tell whenever he comes home. He had spent so much of his life being truthful; it had stood him in good stead, as a writer, as a person. He’s having a hard time getting used to lying all the time, and he’s doing an awful lot of it, elaborate fabrications in nearly every substantive conversation with his wife, his boss. It’s debilitating.

He finds Chloe at the kitchen island, busy with paperwork. She accepts a honey-I’m-home kiss without getting up.

“The windows look good,” she says.

“Don’t they? I’m glad.”

“But I have to admit I was surprised when Viktor showed up. I guess you paid him?”

Damn, is she really going to pursue this now? “I did.”

“Where’d we get the money?”

It looks like she is. Will has practiced this story, but now that the moment is here, curtain rising, he’s nervous, and it’s about this lie in particular, demonstrably untrue. He’s being careful about keeping the CIA’s money out of banks, out of records. But he still needs to spend it.

“My expense backlog,” he says, walking away, pouring himself a glass of water. “From last year.”

He can’t see Chloe’s face, but he can imagine the quizzical look, head cocked, trying to remember what he’d told her about last year’s expenses backlog. Which in truth was not a damned thing.

“I thought I told you about it.”

“I don’t remember.”

“It was from when we were closing on the mortgage refi. Because your account and mine weren’t on the same exact monthly schedule, in order to avoid having wildly conflicting statements that we’d have to explain, I put off submitting expenses for a couple weeks. Then I just forgot about this batch.”

He feels horrible, trying to make her feel forgetful for forgetting something that never happened. This story was a bad idea. He wishes he could go back to the beginning, try something else, but that’s not how it works, lying.

“I found these receipts a couple months ago. The incoming publisher—Stephanie Bloom, did I tell you about her?”

Chloe shakes her head.

“Anyway, she’s apparently a stickler for accounting, so everybody’s on best behavior, looking to clear expenses and invoices quickly before she starts digging into any messes. I got the check a couple weeks ago, and paid Viktor immediately.”

He’s a lying sack of shit, an unacceptable sort of human being.

“There’s still a couple bucks left over. Want to go get drunk? I bet Dean will give us a discount.”

Chloe turns her eyes up at him. She looks tired, defeated, sitting there with a stack of old bills, late notices, estimated-tax forms, the endless tedium of life.

“Sure,” she says, “that’s a good idea.”

“Okay. Just give me a minute to get sorted.” Will often comes home with leftover language from his destination, the occasional trace of an accent. It takes him a couple of days to sound completely like himself.

“Hey Will?”

He turns back. “Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Will feels like a heel. He dumps his laundry into the washing machine, his dry-cleaning into a bag. He refits his phone and computer chargers with their sharp little American prongs. He doesn’t unpack his toilet kit. It’s always ready. Will is always prepared to leave.

He deposits the foreign currency where it belongs, the maps, the business cards, all into their shoeboxes. He steps out of the office, into the hall, his ears attentive to the sounds of Chloe below. He hears the flutter of paper being turned.

He hustles back to the office, to the radiator housing, perforated steel to let heat escape, a solid wood frame with a hinged door on top. He opens this door. Takes the CIA phone out of his pocket, reaches down into the cavity, and lays the phone on the floor.

Another secret, in another hiding spot. This spot is good enough for now. But he’ll need somewhere different by autumn, when the heat will turn back on.

“Nice to see you again, Stephanie,” Malcolm says, without even trying to sound like he means it. “Please”—he motions to a chair—“make yourself comfortable.”

The new publisher takes a seat, crosses her legs. But Malcolm makes her wait at his desk, alone, while he grabs a red Sharpie and crosses the room to what everyone calls the Wall, a massive schematic arrangement of every two-page spread of the next issue—ad pages and content pages, full-page photos and one-column ads, the beginning of this story and the end of that, word counts and due dates, the names of writers and editors and photographers and designers, handwritten one-liners like “Malcolm’s letter TK” and “Full-page food photo,” fully executed final typeset text with art, approved “OK by MS” with a date scrawled in the lower-right margin. Reinventing the wheel every month.

He draws giant X’s across the dummies of the eight and a half pages whose scheduled article is apparently not going to be delivered on time, or possibly ever. The print version of dead air.

“So,” he says, coming back around his desk, “welcome. Glad to have you aboard.”

Stephanie smiles, but none too warmly. “Listen, I know this is awkward.”

“Awkward? Nooo.”

“I want you to know that I have tremendous respect for
Travelers
as a brand, and for you as the steward of that brand.”

“Well, that’s certainly reassuring to hear.”

She smiles. “It’s just that, uh…well, I’m sure you know.”

“Do I?” Malcolm stares at her from across his desk. He’d made Stephanie wait for five minutes out in the anteroom, under the gaze of his inscrutable secretary. “Why don’t you spell it out for me? For, you know, an abundance of clarity?”

“It’s just that the thirty-third floor wants more objective oversight of the finances. Of
every
title. It’s not just
Travelers
, Malcolm. The goal is to try to keep all seven magazines solvent, and to make sure that every conceivable effort is being made, that waste is at a minimum, that every ship is tip-top tight.”

“Tip-top tight? Sorry, that phrase is unfam—”

“Efficient,
I guess would be a more traditional word choice.”

“Sounds like the thirty-third floor doesn’t trust us to run our businesses anymore. Doesn’t trust
me
to run
my
business. Sounds like receivership, Stephanie, is what it sounds like. Like I’m Detroit. Am I Detroit?”

“Not at all, Malcolm, and I’m sorry if you’ve gotten that impression. I can’t reiterate it enough: editorial is your domain entirely. Church and state, Malcolm. As ever.”

The magazine world has a long proud history of keeping editorial matters separate from business ones. But
Travelers
had—until this moment—an unusual history of vesting the titles of both editor and publisher in one person, a single human being who supervised the content of the magazine as well as the business. Apparently that was an unattractive management structure for M&A analysts. So in preparation for selling its magazines, the board of the American Periodical Group insisted on hiring a dedicated publisher, someone who at a minimum would project the appearance of a traditional business.

APG is another independent family-owned company that’s about to be taken over by some faceless international conglomerate, its fate in the ruthless impersonal hands of shareholders and quarterly reports, stock prices and dividends, with no regard to history or tradition or people, to the hundred families who are supported by the magazine. Capitalism doesn’t give a damn. That’s the definition of capitalism.

The someone who the board installed is now sitting across from Malcolm, trying not to be intimidated on her first day on the job. Malcolm isn’t planning on cutting her a break, not today, maybe not ever. One of them is going to be dominant and the other is going to get fired, and Malcolm knows that it has to be him who wins, or the whole goddamned thing will fall apart.

“O-
kay
then, thanks for clearing that up, Stephanie. Is there anything else at the moment? Because, you know, I’ve got a magazine to put out. Badly, apparently.”

Malcolm can’t help but notice, again, the little knit cap she wears on the forefinger of her left hand. It’s a bizarre accessory, and he feels an almost physical compulsion to ask about it, but he doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

“I do, Malcolm, need the password.”

He pretends he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “Come again?”

“The master password.”

Malcolm stares at Stephanie, this officious MBA automaton, all scrubbed clean for her first day, fresh haircut and new suit and shoes, not a scratch on the leather, probably bought just yesterday, a what-the-fuck splurge on Madison, maybe felt buyer’s remorse, excitedly sleepless late at night, to have spent six hundred dollars on shoes when it’s possible she’ll hate the new job and quit within months—or get fired—and have to slink back to the headhunter, six hundred dollars shy of this year’s financial goals, which she probably plotted on an app designed by some HBS classmate of hers. Just the initials HBS make him shiver.

But now that he thinks about it, he’s pretty sure the business degree she got a decade ago was from Wharton. He’s the one who went to Harvard.

“The password that opens
all
the files on the server, Malcolm.”

He continues to stare at her for a few beats, but he knows this isn’t a battle he can win; he can’t hide the financial records from the publisher. He writes the long alphanumeric string on a scratch sheet, holds it out. Stephanie reaches to take the piece of paper, but Malcolm snatches his hand back, a more assholy move than he intended. “Please be careful with this,” he says.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

She sighs, running out of patience with the excessive, unprofessional hostility. “Thanks for your cooperation, Malcolm.” Perhaps there’s some class, in B-school? Up-Managing Obstreperous Colleagues 201. “I hope we can find a way to work together. We have the same interests, you know.”

Do we? Malcolm wonders. I doubt that.

How is Will supposed to write about Ireland when he can’t discuss his abduction? Argentina without his recruitment? France without that kiss? He has a backlog of notes, a surfeit of experiences, but so many are secret.

He’s sitting in the archive room, scanning through old Ireland stories. There haven’t been very many, just a handful, one of them by Jonathan Mongeleach, written back when Jonathan was merely a staff writer, like Will now, his contributions signed
JM
while he traveled the world, looking for his own manifestations of perfection. Jonathan had apparently found it in the west of Ireland, in a Gothic castle that had been converted to an inn, with lush grounds in a countryside dotted by links-style golf courses. The article concluded, “Is this the ideal place for a golfer to retire? Maybe.”

That’s the same sentiment that Will finds himself expressing over and over, in early drafts, before he highlights these sentences, hits Delete.