The Travelers (8 page)

“So what is that something else?”

She knew this question was coming, and she knew she wouldn’t have a great answer for the eminently enviable Dean Fowler, who has three careers flourishing at once. “Right now, I’m still trying to figure it out. In the meantime I’m doing a little of this, a little of that. I’m part-time at an advertising agency, writing advertorials.”

“Ooh. Sexy.”

“Plus articles for wherever, traveling now and then.” She shrugs. “You know, freelance life. Just like you, albeit without the bestsellers and the literary prizes and the Academy Award nominations and the questionable investment choices and the long line of pretty young things waiting to unfurl their panties for you.”

“You know you could always jump to the head of that line, don’t you?”

Now that Chloe has wandered down this alley, she doesn’t quite know how to exit. “So this place is draining your bank account, huh?”

Dean accepts her non sequitur with equanimity. “You know, I’ve never in my life made a single decision based on money.”

“And yet here you are, rich.”

“And yet here I am. Just so.”

Chloe takes a sip of her drink, and watches Dean’s eyes watching her mouth, and she lets that moment play out. It doesn’t take much effort to make men useful. She runs her tongue across her lips.

“Ah!” Dean says, his attention shifted over her shoulder. “There he is!”

Chloe spins around to see her husband, popped up out of nowhere. But that’s not true, not at all: it’s her husband, appearing exactly where and when he’s supposed to appear. She’d allowed herself to forget that, to forget Will, momentarily blinded in the flattering attention of another, more engrossed, less familiar man.

She halfway regrets never having been to bed with Dean, finding out what the big deal is. Another experience she has never had, never will. For a long time she thought of life as an accumulation of experiences, but recently she’s realized that it’s also the opposite: a narrowing. Living the same day, over and over.

This is one of the reasons she left
Travelers,
looking for new ways to fill her days, to crawl out onto a different, more exposed branch of her career’s tree. She hasn’t yet found any fruit out there.

FALLS CHURCH

Raji is packing up, contemplating dinner, when Brock struts by, his shirtsleeves rolled up, carrying a squeeze ball, distorting the
SEMPER FI
tattoo on his hypertrophied forearm. “Whassup, Raj-man?”

Raji nods at his supervisor while the tiny tinny speakers of his monitor bling at him, a supposedly pleasant trill that drives Raji berserk. This new alert is an advance check-in to a flight that departs tomorrow evening, a long-haul overnight trip to another hemisphere.

U.S. passport number: 11331968

Flight: 8 JFK to EZE

Ticket Category: B2

Seat: 19D

Alert code: 4

This guy sure does get around. Raji himself hasn’t been out of the northern Virginia suburbs in a half-year, hasn’t even been into D.C. proper since last fall. He has never left the United States in his entire life. And here is this guy, just back from France, headed to Argentina. Who the hell knows why.

But why is not Raji’s concern. Raji’s concern is that he’s hungry, and it’s 6:08. The Chinese place last night was, no question about it, horrible. Tonight he should beat a safe retreat to the greasy, salty, fast, cheap dependability of Applebee’s. Tomorrow night, maybe, he’ll try something new.

“Listen, Raj-man, I just received new marching orders for you, from our mystery client.”

As far as Raji is concerned, all the clients are mysteries. There are hundreds of them, all identified solely by codes, which he assumes represent operations within the CIA, or possibly in other governmental agencies. Raji sends his alerts and his reports via a closed network to numerical accounts that aren’t associated with any names, any locations, any clue who’s on the other end of his communications.

One client is even more mysterious than others, outside the standard protocols. All the resulting intel is eyes-only, with no VDA management in the loop. Even in the context of VDA’s hush-hush standards, this is notably secretive. And yet more mysterious is that Raji himself was specifically requested by the client, a circumstance that prompted Brock to ask, “Who did you have to blow?” When this client put in the request six months ago, Raji had no idea why. He still has no idea.

“Your watch list has been narrowed down to a dozen, Raj-man. Much smaller list, obviously, but intensely expanded coverage.”

Raji clicks his keyboard and reexamines the screen. Most of the people on this shortened list work for a magazine in New York City; some of the others are their spouses. A couple are foreign citizens, living abroad. This is a strange combination of people to monitor.

“The client wants absolutely everything on these subjects—every card swipe, ATM withdrawal, phone call, text message, E-ZPass scan, online order. Anything whatsoever, anytime, anywhere.”

NEW YORK CITY

Will kisses his wife, long and lithe and impeccable, high heels and a hip-hugging skirt and a scoop neck with a pendant necklace that makes it impossible to ignore her breasts. There’s something cold in Chloe’s response, perfunctory. Is this a fresh fight they’re in? Or just the remnants of an old one? It’s sometimes hard to tell where one ends and another begins, and Chloe has a tendency to hold on to them tenaciously, all of them.

Will knows that of course he
should
be in the doghouse. But how can Chloe know? She can’t. Maybe she senses something coming off him, some aura of wrongdoing. He certainly feels it.

For a few days after Elle, Will had been elated, traveling in beautiful places, with a fresh wonderful memory, and the immense sense of well-being from knowing that he was desired by the one person in the world he most desired. What’s better?

But the thrill wore off, and his eventual flight back to New York was a tortured exercise in sappy self-loathing. He opened his computer and worked badly, then he opened a book and read distractedly, then he watched a mediocre movie halfheartedly. The flight seemed to go on forever.

He arrived home tired and sad, and not at all sure what the point had been, in the end, of saying no to Elle. He had lost something there in France: he’d lost his rightness, and his certainty. And he can’t see what he’d gained.

And now here he is, standing beside his wife, listening to Dean asking, “So, Will, how’s life on the road?”

Will puts his arm around Chloe’s waist. “Not bad; you know they make it easy for me. Safe places, like Argentina tomorrow. But
you
! Everything good?”

The spy accusation leveled against Will is a popular idea of a joke, or at least Will thinks it is. But against Dean, it’s not. Dean has spent large chunks of his career as an international journalist in dangerous places, always accompanied by the conjecture that he’s chummier than necessary with Langley’s operatives.

“Never better.”

“Dean doesn’t think our house project looks quite finished,” Chloe interjects. “Surprised that we’re willing to live in such a dump, I think is what he was communicating to me.”

“Houses are never-ending works in progress,” Dean says. Will can see Chloe roll her eyes, annoyed that another man appears to be taking Will’s side, though Will doesn’t like to think of them as on opposing sides.

Their dining companions arrive, another brownstony-Brooklyn couple, with bro-hugs and cheek-kisses and introductions to Dean. The foursome head to their table in the dimly lit dining room, with the handwritten chalkboard menu replete with the inescapables—the kale salad and heritage pork and house-cured charcuterie, organic everything, locally sourced and painstakingly provenanced, of a piece with ride-share bicycles and recycled denim and vintage vinyl. Suddenly Will feels like a cliché, like he’s living in one of his own articles, eating meals in restaurants that have been written about dozens of times before, by him, in the company of people he may have invented out of his imagination. The waitress reading specials from her pad, reciting the catchphrases he hears in his sleep—the “line-caught” that follows “tonight our fish is a,” the “medium-rare” that comes after “the chef recommends.”

Will can anticipate all two hours of couple-y conversation, the preordained debate about the second bottle of wine, the halfhearted tussle for the check, always 20 percent more than anyone expects it to be, everywhere, all the time.

He can imagine the slow walk home, the streetlight streaming in the window, flickering through the swaying branches of the oak, as his wife lies back in bed, spreading her legs, guiding him in and shutting her eyes, licking her lips and bucking her hips, and he can’t help but wonder if Chloe will be pretending that someone else is atop her, while he pictures himself thrusting between the long tan Australian legs of Elle Hardwick.

“Hey,” Will says, rubbing his eyes. “What’s happening?”

“Can’t sleep. Going for a run.” Chloe kisses her husband on the top of his explosion of bed-heady hair. “Go back to sleep. Love you.”

Out on the sidewalk, she looks both ways before setting off. This neighborhood is gentrifying, in the present tense; housing projects loom at the end of the block, known drug dealers occupy a nearby corner with the disciplined rigor of a military platoon. Chloe doesn’t wear headphones when she jogs these streets; she doesn’t want to lose track of herself, of her surroundings, their dangers.

It takes twenty minutes of running west to arrive at land’s end, at the riverfront amid the bridges that connect Brooklyn to Manhattan, all of them huge structures, astounding feats of engineering and construction. She can’t imagine bridges like these getting built today. That’s no longer how public-sector America works.

Not a soul is visible to the end of the street, which dead-ends at an unoccupied park, a buffer between the refurbished industrial buildings and the shimmering quilt of river, reflecting the lights from the bridges and skyscrapers beyond. She can’t help but think of Woody Allen, I don’t care what anyone says, this city is a knockout.

She turns her back to the knockout view, faces up the street.

A man turns the corner. He too is a jogger, running toward her, quickly but unrushed, long legs and an athletic stride, a slight limp. As he approaches she can see his ratty tee shirt,
HARVARD FOOTBALL
, an ill-considered choice, an adamant invitation: mug me!

Chloe scans the cobblestoned street, the darkened windows of loft buildings, the eerie black voids behind the windshields of a dozen cars. Her eye is drawn to a rat scurrying into a drainage grate, down into the invisible world beneath the street.

The man is slowing. Then he’s walking. He comes to a stop a few feet from her.

“Hi Malcolm,” she says.

“Chloe.” He kisses her on the cheek. “You look fantastic.”

“Thanks.”

“I guess this change has been good for you?”

She looks away from his accusatory gaze. “It was time, Mal.”

He nods. “Do you want to hear that I miss you?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Well I do.”

“Mal—”

He holds up his hand. “But that’s not why I needed to see you tonight.”

He takes a taxi back across the river. A half-mile from home, he gets out of the cab, and jogs the rest of the way. Malcolm doesn’t particularly want the additional ten minutes of exercise, and his knee is really sore. His goal is visual in a more short-term sense: he needs to work up a credible sweat. Because what he doesn’t want is to be caught by his wife returning from a supposed midnight jog sweat-free. Allison would think he’d been with someone, and Chloe might be whom she’d suspect. Allie is an irrational mess these days. But she’d be halfway correct.

Malcolm is running against traffic, headlights in his face, horns blaring, lights blinking on bicycles.

He’s worried about Will. Malcolm had assumed he’d be able to trust Will with no reservations, without needing to worry about Will snooping, or being compromised, or being any type of pain in the ass. That’s why Malcolm hired Will to begin with: to be reliable. But suddenly he’s looking a bit un-.

Malcolm is also concerned about this new life of Chloe’s. And about Gabriella too—she has had a truly terrible year.

Plus Malcolm is always concerned about
Travelers
—the day-to-day challenges of putting out a magazine, of managing existing staff and hiring new, of precarious finances. And of course he’s worried about the secrets.

It’s all so tenuous, always so close to falling apart.

Around the next corner is the front entrance to his building, but he keeps jogging past it.

When he and Allison were apartment-hunting last year, one of Malcolm’s few requirements—unspoken—was that their new home offer two different exits, on two different streets. He had a hard time investigating this while touring apartments with the broker. “Is there a garage? I’d like to see it,” he’d said. “The laundry room is in the basement? Can we check that out?” Allie had looked at him like he’d lost his marbles.

Small buildings were out of the question, unless they were on a corner lot. Eventually Malcolm had to claim to Allie that he wanted to live in a big building, a starchitect skyscraper with twenty-four-hour doormen and a live-in super and a garage and, you know,
amenities.
In truth the only amenity he wanted was a back entrance on the next street.

He needed a way to sneak out, and a way to sneak back in, which is exactly what he does now, drenched with sweat to mask his secrets.

BUENOS AIRES

Will suffers through a deeply disturbing tango show, a nightmare interlude in a David Lynch movie. As an antidote he heads to a karaoke bar, which is one of the things he does to amuse himself at eleven at night, in other countries, alone.

He sings “What a Good Boy.” His college band once warmed up for Barenaked Ladies in a little club in Wicker Park, a lucky gig to have landed, back when Will vaguely imagined that music was what he’d do. The band imploded due to a love triangle, nothing to do with talent or ambition, just the predictable entanglements of youth. Six months later Will had a new girlfriend, and a busier position on the school newspaper.

He steps off the small stage, and notices a text message from someone he doesn’t know, an unfamiliar local number, giving an address.
Who’s this?
Will replies.

Luis! Esteban’s cousin!

Esteban is the hotel concierge. Will gets the distinct feeling that Esteban is an avid procurer of whatever it is that his guests could want. Will wonders what exactly Esteban has anticipated Will wants. But the club is nearby, and as a rule Will really does say yes to everything. It’s not a come-on line he uses on beautiful Australians.

Will picks his way around the uncollected dog-shit and trash on the sidewalks under the palm trees, he pays the cover and tips the doorman, he jumps around on a foreign dance floor until he’s soaking with sweat, his pores purging the Malbec and the lingering chill of the tango, those middle-aged men with their Brilliantined hair, those women with too much rouge and too high heels, their gazes lingering too long, too close, too needy for too much.

“Here!” Luis pushes a shot glass across the bar to Will. Then another pair in the other direction, toward two young women.
“¡Salud!”

All four of them throw back their little glasses of potent liquor, grimace.

“I miss America!” Luis screams, apropos of nothing. “I attended college in North Carolina! Two years! This is our other cousin Magdalena! And her friend Tatiana!”

“¡Mucho gusto!”

“¡Hola!”

Will looks at the women, two barely distinguishable versions of the same type of Argentinean sexiness, long dark everything.

“
Oyé,
Will!” Luis leans closer, exuding a potpourri of liquor and cigarettes and sweat. “We leave to go to after-hours party! Stay until dawn!” Luis taps his nose. “It is Friday night!” Explanation enough. “You come?”

The dance club is in the basement of a mid-fifties apartment building on a boulevard lined with similar structures, Travertine marble and potted palms, doormen behind wide desks in glass-walled lobbies. With the disco and the blow, the whole thing seems like Miami in the eighties, Don Johnson about to show up, flash that fictional smile. But instead these real girls flash their own real smiles.

It’s as if the whole world is conspiring to turn Will into an adulterer. It’s comical, flirting with tragic.

“Muchas gracias,”
Will says, backing away once again from the tragicomedy. “But I’m sorry to say”—hand on Luis’s shoulder, sincere regrets—“I cannot join you.”

CAPRI

The American woman glances at her buzzing phone, an incoming text message from her husband, a photo of a pretty place.
Wish you were here. How’s Istanbul?

She looks around this cliffside terrace, a picture-postcard view of the sea, the cliffs of Capri, the Sorrento Peninsula in the distance, the Amalfi coast, Positano, storied places. She arrived here just a couple hours ago after two planes, a ferry, and a taxi.

She checks the weather app on her phone, the forecast for Istanbul.

Humid, rainy, gross,
she types.
Wish I was there.

She puts down her phone. Lights a cigarette, suppresses a cough. Jesus, how do people smoke these things? But cigarettes present a lot of opportunities. For example: to stand, to saunter across the terrace, where she collects an ashtray from a different table, all of this activity affording her the excuse to scout her surroundings.

She carries the ashtray to the low wall that separates the
terrazzo
from the hundreds of feet of nearly vertical cliff down to the boulders of the shoreline. It’s not a serviceable beach down there, offering no access to any outpost of humanity, no road or path. Just wild seacoast, severe and beautiful and perfect.

“
Un’altra limonata, Signora Delgado?
” the waitress asks. Marina Delgado is the name she’s using here in Italy; that’s even what she’s calling herself in her head. Marina Delgado.

“
Sì, grazie
.” She had a friend in middle school named Marina, which makes it easier.

There are eleven hotel guests lounging on the floral-print canvas cushions that match the umbrellas, surrounded by ceramic planters of cactus and lavender, and wrought-iron table frames topped with pebbled glass holding beaded drinks and glossy magazines and folded eyeglasses. Marina herself is wearing giant sunglasses, frames that cover half her face. She’s not recognizable, not unless someone is looking for her, and no one would be.

There are more luxurious hotels on the island. Better restaurants. Bigger suites and grander lobbies and more resourceful concierges. What this hotel offers is this landscaped platform hundreds of feet above the Tyrrhenian, facing the craggy cliffs that rise dramatically from the azure sea dotted with sailboats and speedboats, the mainland on the horizon. It doesn’t get any prettier. If you stay in this hotel, you lie on this terrace. That’s the point.

Right now there’s a German couple out here, both tall and pink and muscled.

A fat mustached man who looks possibly Spanish.

A pair of teenage girls, both staring at their devices, the view and surroundings lost to them, inhabiting social-media worlds, the locale nothing in its own right, just another selfie backdrop, here I am, please look at me, tell me you like me.

Another pair of middle-aged women—the girls’ mothers?—are sitting far away, giving the girls privacy, talking in hushed tones, exchanging bits of gossip, mortifying anecdotes about other teenage girls, their bad choices and predictable outcomes.

A trio of pensioners, perhaps a married couple with a spinster sister.

Marina is the eleventh person, just another scantily clad woman reading fashion magazines and smoking cigarettes on a chaise longue at a fancy hotel. Noticeable, but also ordinary. There are always people like her in places like this.

Now a twelfth person arrives, wearing one of the hotel’s sea-green terry-cloth robes, ostentatious gold crest embroidered on the breast.

Marina feels her pulse accelerating while she delays looking directly at the newcomer, until she can’t help herself anymore, and then from the safety of her sunglasses she redirects her eyes to examine his face—

But no.

ARGENTINA

Will rides horses at an estancia, learns to rustle livestock, to milk cows at sunrise. He looks the lamb in the eye before the farmer slits its throat and hangs the carcass from the rafters, draining blood into a dented tin bucket.

The next night they grill the lamb on an iron spit over a wood fire in an open pit, and eat big chunks, hewn by a machete, accompanied by an unlabeled bottle of young Malbec from the neighboring finca.

Will can now go an entire day without thinking about Elle, who’s fading into his past, dragging his guilt out with her receding tide. He’ll be fine.

CAPRI

The ice in her drink melts. The late-afternoon wind picks up, flapping the umbrellas, blowing around the cellophane wrapping of a cigarette packet. The magazine slips from her lap and tumbles to the terra-cotta tiles.

Marina wakes with a start, momentarily unaware of where she is, of who she is, with the dry pucker of a jet-lagged mouth. She takes a swig of her watery warm
limonata
, and runs her tongue around the inside of her mouth, rubs the sleep out of her eyes.

She looks around the patio, whose contents have shifted somewhat during her unintentional nap. There’s a new person out here. A man, white hair, late-middle-aged but very fit, virile looking, confident.

She gathers her wits, focuses her mind. She carefully examines the other guests, a somewhat different crowd from before she fell asleep, and the waitress, and the pool boy. She checks the time, checks her messages. Thinks through her plan, yet again, step one and step two, steps three and four and five, up through eighteen, all the things she’s going to do, and when, and what alternatives she’ll pursue if something goes wrong, her mind buzzing, her body coming alive—

And then: stop.

Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Just like yoga. Except sort of the opposite.

She taps a cigarette out of the packet. Tries the lighter once, twice, failing to ignite. She shakes the thing, and flicks her thumb across the wheel again, again, again, growing visibly frustrated. “Fuck,” she mutters.

Marina glances around the terrace, as if she’s searching for evidence of other smokers, but that’s just pretend, she already knows what she’s going to find, and where. She stands and adjusts her bikini, a garment that no one, anywhere, would consider modest. She can feel the man’s eyes turn her way, an instinctive reaction.

She takes a step, pauses, as if reconsidering. She bends over—again, confident that she’s drawing attention—and plucks up a towel, wraps it around her waist. She wants to be seen to be a woman who doesn’t want to seem titillating on an outrageous level.

She walks across the tiles, one foot and then another, repeat, repeat, and remember to breathe evenly, in, out, in, out.

“Scusi?”
She smiles down at this man, but not too warmly. A perfunctory smile is what she’s going for, the type of smile a pretty young woman gives a man because she wants something, and thinks she has to be nice to get it.
“Parla inglese?”

“Yes,” he says, “I do.” He’s better-looking than she expected.

“Might I use your lighter? Mine seems to be, um, dead.”

“Of course.” The heavy gold lighter has a smooth action, a steady blue flame, a pleasant click when the cover closes. This lighter is not to her taste, but she’d like to keep it anyway. Maybe she will, a souvenir. Though that’s obviously a mistake.

“Grazie,
” she says, then returns to her chaise, walking slowly.

Step three: complete.

ARGENTINA

“This certainly seems like quite a life,” Will says, looking over the wide-open expanse of the plains, seemingly limitless, boundless, anything possible. The two nearest big cities, Buenos Aires and Santiago, are both five hundred miles away. “What the American West used to be, before it became shopping malls and call centers.”

Fernando doesn’t understand this, but doesn’t bother asking for clarification. It’s not part of his job description.

“Are there any Americans living out here? Retirees? Old people?”

“Sí.”

“Do you think we could find any? I’d like to talk to some.”

So they go see the middle-aged couple from Nevada who bought a working cattle ranch, turned it into a bed-and-breakfast, but almost no one comes. A few towns away is a woman who left Palm Beach when she fell in love with a polo player, followed him to B.A. and got pregnant and then jilted, and moved out here to a new friend’s guesthouse to raise her child, a horrifically thought-out parenting decision after what was clearly a long series of other ill-considered lifestyle choices.

“Want a glass of something?” she asks. Will is afraid of her, and her poor decision-making rubric. “The kid is asleep.”

Will begs off, returns to the quiet ranch, an arthritic little terrier named Chico at his side while he writes, trying to stick to his regimen. Then he goes to sleep alone, in the middle of nowhere, far from home, again.

MENDOZA

The representative from the hotel chain is, as usual, a good-looking young woman, efficient and informative, an adequate guide and a companionable companion. She shows Will around the city, then drives out to their new flagship property in the nearby countryside, a sprawling lodge nestled in vineyards, with polo fields and a stocked lake and eighteen holes of golf, the Andes in the distance below a deep cerulean sky.