The Expats (15 page)

They were ticking off items on a to-do list that was magnet-attached to the fridge. There were nineteen items on the list. They’d crossed off fifteen.

The final item was underlined:
Make a life
.

Maybe this whole thing was a terrible mistake.

“I DON’T KNOW anything specific about Torres,” Kate had said.

“Anything nonspecific?”

Kate had struggled not to cut her eyes away from Evan. She’d been expecting this line of questioning since the very beginning of this process. She’d been expecting it for a half-decade.

“Torres had no shortage of enemies,” she said.

“Yes. But at the time of his demise, he was at a low ebb. It was an odd time for him to be taken out.”

Kate managed, barely, to maintain eye contact. “Grudges,” she said, “are timeless.”

Evan’s pen was poised above his pad, but there had been nothing worth writing down. He tapped the ballpoint against the paper, four slow taps, keeping a beat.

“Yes,” he agreed, “they certainly are.”

“WELL, WELL, WELL. Isn’t this a pleasant surprise?”

Kate was walking in the Grand Rue, lined with bakeries and
chocolatiers
and butchers, lingerie shops and shoe stores, pharmacies and jewelers. The pedestrian route was semi-open to traffic in the mornings, for deliveries. Small trucks were inching down the street, or parked in front of stores, idling. Shopgirls were unlocking doors, carrying boxes, checking hair and makeup; deliverymen were operating hydraulic lifts, pushing dollies, carrying bulky boxes. And here was so-called Bill Maclean, nonexistent currency trader from Chicago.

“Yes,” Kate said, “it certainly is. What gets you out of the office this morning?”

Kate had been wanting to tell Dexter about her research. She’d been partially amused by her discovery that the Macleans were on some level fictional. But she also imagined scenarios in which they were fugitives from bankruptcy, or in the witness-protection program, or mobsters in hiding. Bank robbers, murderers, dangerous criminals on the lam. Or maybe, even, they were CIA.

But there were a few impediments to telling Dexter about any of her suspicions. First was that Bill was rapidly becoming Dexter’s friend. His only friend. The two men had played tennis again followed by dinner again, and Dexter had come home late, and happy.

As a couple, Kate and Dexter had been to a wine tasting organized by the American Women’s Club; they’d been to a school mixer; they’d gone to the movies and the theater. They’d been invited to another family’s house for a dinner, and they’d hosted a different family. They knew some people. But it was really Kate who knew a few women, and Dexter was merely along, as a husband, making small talk with British bankers and Dutch lawyers and Swedish salesmen. But Bill Maclean was Dexter’s, and Kate didn’t want to take that away. She didn’t want to seem to be trying to take it away.

The second impediment was that she didn’t want to acknowledge that part of her impetus to Internet stalking was a long habit of trusting no one. A habit whose genesis was the self-knowledge that she herself was untrustworthy.

“Uh-oh.” Bill was smiling mischievously. “Looks like you’ve caught me.”

“At what?”

Third was she absolutely couldn’t admit that some of the motivation—a tiny part, but more than nonexistent—was sexual attraction.

“Well, my wife has left town. She went to Brussels this morning.”

Kate had reconciled herself to saying nothing to Dexter about the Macleans’s phantom nature. Not until—not unless—she discovered more. Or until she tried to discover more and failed to unearth anything, which would be its own discovery.

“So I’m walking around the
ville
”—Bill took a step closer, then another, then he whispered in her ear—“looking for a woman who I can spend the day in bed with.”

Kate’s mouth dropped open.

Bill’s smile grew, then he laughed. “Just kidding,” he said. He hefted a small shopping bag. “I needed something at the computer store.”

She slapped him on the chest, not too hard. “Bastard.” She stared at him, intrigued; he stared right back, playful. This could be a fun thing. Maybe it would benefit both Kate and Bill, perhaps in a way all four of them. A harmless little flirtation. Everyone has them.

“That was quite a maneuver you pulled in Paris,” Kate said. “Very brave. Very manly.”

“Oh pshaw.” Facetiously. “It was nothing.”

“Where’d you learn how to do that?”

“I didn’t learn anything,” he said. “That was just my lightning-fast reflexes.”

This didn’t seem true, but Kate knew better than to push. “Is Julia really in Brussels?”

“Yes. She went to see an old friend who’s passing through, for whatever reason it is that people go to Belgium.”

“An old friend from college?”

“No.”

“Where’d Julia go to college, anyway?” Kate kept her eyes glued to Bill’s, looking for a sign of evasion. There was none.

“University of Illinois.”

“And you? What’s your alma mater?”

“Wow.”

“Wow what?”

Bill looked left, then right. “I didn’t realize that I’d be on a
job
interview, here on the street. As you know, all’s I was hoping for was a midday dalliance.” He grinned. “But now that we’re in it, I have to ask: how much does this particular position pay?”

“That depends,” she said, “on a number of factors.”

“Such as?”

“Well, where’d you receive your undergraduate degree?”

A quick look of confusion—maybe concern—flitted across his eyes, his forehead. But around the mouth, the smile remained frozen in place. “Chicago.”

“University of?”

“That’s right.”

“Not bad. Your major?”

“I got around.”

She arched an eyebrow.

“Let’s call it
interdisciplinary
.”

“Hmm. And graduate school?”

“None.”

“I see. Most recent position?”

“Senior partner for a boutique currency trading firm.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Went out of business,” he said, with something that sounded like finality; this part of the game was over. But Bill was still wearing a small smug smile, the supremely confident look of one of those guys who’s competent at everything, at skiing and tennis and auto repairs and finish-carpentry, at communicating in languages he doesn’t speak, at tipping porters and bribing cops, at foreplay and oral sex.

“Listen,” he said, taking a step toward her, again, “to tell you the truth, my current gig is pretty good, and I just started it; I’m not really looking for a new one. So”—again, leaning in too far, his mouth right beside her head, his lips to her ear, making the hairs on her neck stand on end—“are we going to bed, or not?”

Bill was pretending it was a joke. But no one makes this joke unless it’s not one. It’s an excuse to open the door to a possibility; it’s an announcement, loud and clear, that the door is open. “Your husband, I believe, is also out of town.”

Although Kate had never been unfaithful, she’d been invited. More than a couple of times. It was this type of supposed joke that had been one of the more common forms of proposition.

Kate felt a chink in her armor, in her lifelong struggle against men like Bill: slick men, manipulative men, dangerous men. The opposite breed of beast from the man she’d married, the more civilized type that she’d willed herself, intellectually and pragmatically, to choose.

“No,” Kate said, shaking her head, but smiling, “we’re not going to bed,” fully cognizant that her answer sounded equivocal. Although she would never end up going there, she felt compelled to let Bill lead her along.

“If you say so,” he said.

KATE HAD LET down her vigilance, and had allowed the boys’ mess to migrate to the guest room, the office, the space where she now sat, waiting for the suddenly slow DSL connection to refresh a page, looking disgustedly around the room at the giant plastic vehicles—a human-limb-sized airplane, a helicopter, various police and fire vehicles—that were littering the floor. She felt compelled to clean up, but also repelled; she couldn’t stand picking up toys.

The screen blinked back to life, the page finished loading. There were three campuses for the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign graduated seven thousand per class; six thousand at Chicago; five thousand at Springfield. Some quick calculations ended at a universe of fifty thousand female U of I grads in the possible time span. How many could be named Julia?

As for Bill: there were fewer than fifteen hundred graduates per class at the University of Chicago, and there was no maiden-name issue.

Kate stared at the phone number on the screen, the handset in her hand. Was she really going to do this? Why?

Yes. Because she was innately distrustful, and professionally suspicious. Because she was bored. Because she couldn’t help herself.

“Yes,” said the woman at the registrar’s office, in the broad, flat Midwestern accent that neither Bill nor Julia seemed to have inherited from their homeland. “We had a William Maclean class of ’92. Could that be who you’re looking for?”

“I imagine so. Is there any way for you to e-mail me a photo?”

“No, I’m sorry. We don’t keep photo records of our alumni.”

“What about a yearbook?” Kate asked. “He must be in the yearbook.”

“Not all students choose to include their photos in yearbooks, ma’am.”

“Is there any way for you to check?” As sweetly as possible. “Please?”

No response. Kate thought the line had been disconnected. “Hello?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll check. Please hold.”

Kate used the ensuing silence to wonder whether Dexter would ever examine their phone bill. And if he did, whether he would ask Kate why she was placing calls to Chicago, of all places; he of course knew
she had no friends in Chicago. And if he did look at the bill, and ask her about it, whether she would answer with the truth, or … maybe she would claim this was some type of customer-service issue, something involving … what? … what could be the fake reason—

“I’m sorry, ma’am. It looks like William Maclean was one of those students in the class of ’92 who chose not to include his photo in the yearbook.”

“That’s too bad.” Not to mention incongruous: the man Kate knew was not someone who would forgo a portrait. And he never would’ve been.

10

Alone again. Not really alone: with the children, but no husband.

Kate sat down at the computer, again.

What would be the most logical, obvious reason to create fake identities? She opened the browser, her mind meandering …

Her first thought, her strongest instinct, was that it would be to hide from something horrible. Something unforgivable and unforgettable that one of them had done. A crime. A murder, and he—she?—had been acquitted, but their lives ruined. So they left the country.

Or it could have been nonviolent, white-collar: he was an embezzler, a crooked accountant. A CFO cooking the books, and he’d sold out the CEO in return for immunity. His reputation was ruined, his social standing unrecoverable, so they were starting afresh.

Or it was her. She could’ve just served a ten-year sentence for—what? Corrupting a minor? DWI manslaughter? He’d waited for her, neither patiently nor faithfully, but waited nevertheless. She was released. They changed their names and left the country.