The Expats (32 page)

Kate stared ahead while these two men talked across her, zipping through the sky.

“I’m Dexter Moore. My wife, Kate.”

“I’m Kyle. Pleased to meet you.”

“You staying here?” Dexter asked. “Or visiting from another resort?”

“Day-tripping, actually. Up from Geneva. I live there.”

The chair rumbled through a support tower.

“We’re skiing with some other Americans today,” Dexter said. “Friends from Luxembourg. That’s where we live.”

Kyle couldn’t figure out how to continue this conversation; nor how to stop it. Kate didn’t know what the hell to do about this. So she just sat silently, while the men made small talk.

BILL TOOK OFF his Muppet mitten, and Kyle did the same, and the two shook hands, introductions all around.

“We found this lonely American on the mountain,” Dexter explained. They were standing on a wind-blown ridge, with a sharp drop-off onto a steep mogul field to one side, an unskiable cliff to the other, cordoned off with a slack yellow rope that would do nothing to slow people down, much less stop them, on their way off the edge.

Bill gave Kyle a once-over. “You don’t say.”

Kyle smiled, big white teeth gleaming out of winter ruddiness.

Dexter checked his watch. “We have to go. Ski-school pickup is in a few minutes.” He turned to Kyle. “Want to join us for après-ski?”

Kyle hesitated, but not too long. Not long enough for anyone to think it was anything other than a man considering an unexpected social invitation. “Sure,” he said. “Love to.”

The light was failing, the sun out of view, over a jagged summit to the southwest. The five Americans traversed the ridge in a snaking line, their ski edges scraping loudly against hard-packed crud, interspersed with soft whooshes through the softer snow, the rustle of nylon rubbing nylon, a clank as a pole hit a boot. Kate heard Bill close behind, and couldn’t stop the shiver running down her spine.

No one said anything.

Around a bend and the
centre de la station
came into view, the cluster of tall buildings surrounding the Village des Enfants, the horse-drawn carriages moving with surprising speed, all of it cloaked in fresh snow, dotted with sharp pinpoints of electric lights, a complicated foreground against a simple backdrop of canyon and valley and more mountains and the immense broadness of the cerulean sky.

“Who’s Kyle?” Bill asked.

Kate shrugged dismissively. “Guy from a chairlift.”

“Yeah,” Bill snorted. “Like I’m a guy from a tennis club.”

Kate’s brain went haywire. She didn’t understand what Bill was saying. Her mouth was open, then she closed it, then opened it again, but she couldn’t think of anything to say without giving something away. But saying nothing would also be giving something away. “I don’t know what you mean by that.”

A gust of wind blew the loose snow into the air. The sky seemed to be dimming by the second.

“Are you going to tell me? ”

Bill stared at her for a second, two, but then skied away without saying anything.

There was only one explanation: he knew. He knew that she knew.

Kate pushed off, following Bill down the hill and around a bend and across a plateau and into the thick humanity swarming around the center of the resort, parents pouring into the children’s area, big hugs and high fives and toddlers crying from the relief of finally seeing Mommy after a seemingly interminable and possibly terrifying day.

Dexter skied through the gates of the ski school, while Julia and Bill volunteered to go to the nearest café and claim a big table. Kyle and Kate were left alone, standing side by side in the middle of the main path, surrounded by thousands of people.

“You’re not going to like this,” he said.

Kate watched Dexter lean over to gather the children in big hugs, one in each arm. Even through the crowd and the gear, under the helmets and the goggles, Kate could see the giant smiles of unmitigated joy on the boys’ faces. Reunion.

“What they’re investigating,” Kyle said.

Kate turned to him. “Yes?”

“It’s your husband.”

KATE WISHED SHE was surprised; but she wasn’t. She also wished she wasn’t relieved; but she was. At least a little. Whatever her husband had done, it couldn’t be as bad as what she herself had done.

“What do they think he did?”

Dexter was removing the boys’ bright-yellow identifying vests—premier ski—that made them look like miniature contestants in a grand slalom.

“Cyber theft.”

“Of what?”

Julia had suddenly returned. “We’re over there,” she said.

Kate’s heart skipped a beat—a few beats.

“That bistro with the green awning,” Julia continued. Kate could barely hear her through the din; there’s no way Julia could’ve heard their conversation. Could she?

The children were approaching, carrying their skis across their chests, followed by a grinning Dexter. Kate gave the boys hugs, trying but failing to distract herself, even minutely, from the dreadfulness that was assailing her.

Everyone trudged through the snow and crowds toward Bill, seated
alone in the middle of a huge picnic table, like a disgraced executive at the end of a board meeting.

Kate needed less than a minute more, maybe just a few seconds, alone with Kyle.

They all settled at the rough-hewn table, accepted delivery of hot chocolates topped with whipped cream, and giant mugs of frothy beer, and plates of apple galette.

“So,” Bill said, “Kyle, is it?”

“That’s right, Bill.”

“You live in Geneva?”

“I do.”

“Interesting town?”

“Not terribly.”

“You look familiar. Do we know each other?”

Kate was going to explode.

“I don’t think so.”

Bill nodded, but it wasn’t a gesture of agreement. “What do you do, Kyle?”

“I’m a lawyer. But you’ll have to excuse me,” he said, rising, “because I’m a lawyer who needs the men’s room.”

Kate felt Bill’s eyes on her, felt his suspicion of Kyle oozing across the table, the slime of it covering herself. She pretended to people-watch, skiers in snowsuits and bright jackets and helmets, children in snowball fights, dogs barking, waitresses carrying trays filled with steins, grandmothers in furs, teenagers smoking cigarettes.

Kate pushed herself across the bench. “Excuse me,” she said, not meeting any eye.

She could feel Bill and Julia staring at each other, knew they were sending signals, having a whole conversation about whether to follow Kate to the restroom, and which one should do it, and whether it should be overt or surreptitious.

“I’ll join you,” Julia said. Of course.

Kate walked among tables, and waited for a horse-drawn carriage to pass, and a pair of squealing girls to run by, and one spun just in time to get hit in the face by a snowball, triggering an instant nosebleed and high-pitched crying. A big thick drop of blood hit the icy snow, and another drop, then a flurry of a few, a small splattering there at the girl’s feet. Her mother arrived, scolding what was obviously a pleased little brother, pressing a napkin to the girl’s injured nose, the blood spreading through the snow. That same pattern again, writ small. Spreading blood.

KATE HAD PASSED a difficult night after the unpleasant conclusion to the unscheduled meeting with Torres at the hotel; she was without question afraid of him. It was a long painful night of hand-wringing and plotting and counterplotting.

Kate hadn’t been able to fall asleep until she’d made up her mind, with a heart-stopping finality, at three in the morning. She was awakened two hours later, when Jake cried to start his day. She fed him, and sat with him, and cooed at him, staring off into the lightening sky over the stockade fence that separated her barely tended garden from the scrubby, weedy yard of the multi-unit rental to the east.

Kate didn’t know it yet, but she was pregnant again. Not intentionally. But also not disappointingly.

Twenty-four hours later she was on the Amtrak to New York, an unreserved seat purchased with cash at a ticket counter in Union Station, wearing oversize eyeglasses with clear lenses—her vision didn’t need correcting—and a blond wig. She then walked from Penn Station up- and across town, thirty minutes through the crowded meat of Manhattan, with a quick stop to buy a Yankees cap from a sidewalk shop exploding with China-produced merchandise. She wore the cap low, blond bangs brushing her eyelids.

Kate entered the Waldorf-Astoria not on Park Avenue but through the quieter Forty-ninth Street entrance. She got off the elevator at a few minutes after nine. It was too early for there to be a large housekeeping presence on the floor—too many guests would still be asleep. But it was late enough that the businesspeople would be gone. It was a quiet time of day on a hotel guest floor.

Kate knew that Torres was not an exception to the Mexican-time rule. He was often late for meetings, sometimes by as much as an hour. And he neither saw anyone nor did anything before ten in the morning. Kate had honestly never understood how they accomplished anything in that country.

Kate knew he’d be alone in his room at a time like 9:08
A.M.

She didn’t encounter anyone in the plushly carpeted hall until she came to the bodyguard who stood at Torres’s door. He was a squat, angry-looking man in a cheap black suit that was way too tight. The early-morning shift wasn’t the A-team, not the big imposing guys who would sit at restaurant bars at night. This morning guy was B-team. At best.

When Kate was just a few feet away, she smiled demurely at the
bodyguard without slowing down or breaking stride, to all appearances continuing on to some other room down the hall, drawing her hand out of her coat pocket, the switchblade already open, her arm shooting across her body, the knife sinking smoothly and quietly into the man’s trachea, his eyes wide, registering his dire situation, his arms attempting to rise but too late, his body slumping, sliding down the wall while she supported his weight under the armpits, to avoid the alarm-inducing thud of a heavy body hitting a hard floor.

KATE NEEDED TO get Julia in front of her, and she was running out of space, out of time. Kate limped for a few steps. “Excuse me,” she said. “My sock has bunched up. You go ahead.”