The Expats (37 page)

Dexter stood, taking the boys by their little hands, leading them away. Halfway across the room, Ben turned back, and smiled at his mother, mischievously.

BECAUSE AMSTERDAM WAS his trip to meet his friend—his idea, all the way—it was Dexter who’d chosen the hotel, made the reservation. This hotel seemed more expensive than their normal. Four stars, but definitely edging up toward five, not down toward three.

While Dexter checked in, Kate and the boys waited in the hall, on a velvet-tufted love seat with a carved wood frame, surrounded by ornate flocked wallpaper, thick plaster moldings intersecting with the fifteen-foot ceilings.

“Ben,” she whispered, “did you tell Daddy what I was doing?”

“When?”

“Upstairs? In your room?”

“I mean, when did I tell him?”

“In the bathroom, at the restaurant? Or, I don’t know,
ever
? Did you
ever
tell him?”

Ben glanced at his older brother, as if for explanation, or support. But Jake was cuddled against his teddy bear, sucking his thumb, nearly asleep. No help.

“About the bad work that he did?” Ben asked.

“That’s right,” Kate said. “Did you tell him?”

Dexter glanced around, smiled at Ben, turned back to the clerk.

“No,” Ben said. He too was smiling.

“Ben? Are you telling me the truth?”

“Yes, Mommy.” Still smiling.

“Then why the big smile, sweetie?”

“I dunno.”

THE CHILDREN FELL asleep immediately in the fold-out sofa, leaning toward each other, separated by the cheerful-looking teddy bear, ragged and thin, losing weight and dingy.

Kate understood that it had been absurd of her to refuse to be suspicious of Dexter. But at least she was aware of why she’d been absurd: a liar doesn’t want to think that other people are liars, because then the other people should suspect her of lying too, because she is, and she’ll get caught.

Dexter emerged from the bathroom, white boxers and a white tee, springy tufts of hair curling out of the pale skin along his legs and arms, extra-pasty. A pale man in the depths of a sunless winter.

He lay down in bed, hands folded in lap. He didn’t pick up anything to read, didn’t say anything.

Jake snorted, a rutting animal, then began to snore. Dexter lay unmoving, inactive. Kate didn’t want to glance over, didn’t want to see what expression he was wearing, what he was thinking. She didn’t want to start any discussion, didn’t want to get into it.

But she also did. Desperately. She needed this—needed something—to come out in the open. She needed to stop adding secrets, needed to stop generating questions.

She closed the guidebook in her lap, a flurry of resolve, the sound of her thoughts deafening, turning to him, opening her mouth, her pulse pounding in her brain, starting to speak, ready to get it all off her chest, or get some of it into the open, or something, she wasn’t sure, but she spoke. “Dexter,” she began, turning to him, “I—”

She froze, midsentence, midthought, mideverything. He was sound asleep.

THEY WENT TO the Van Gogh Museum and the flower market, not much to see in the dead of winter. Bulbs for sale, trowels, seed packets.
They agreed that the Anne Frank Museum would raise too many unpleasant topics and unanswerable questions, so they skipped it.

When it was time for a bribe for the children, they entered a toy store. Gave the boys carte blanche for any box of Lego. Any small box. “I’ll take care of this,” Dexter said, only vaguely aware of the discussions, considerations, and negotiations that were about to ensue.

So Kate stepped back out into Hartenstraat, Saturday-afternoon crowded, everyone bundled and behatted, smoking and laughing, on bicycles and foot. She saw a familiar figure, out of the corner of her eye, at the end of the intimate block. It was a posture and a bearing Kate recognized, a height and weight, under a big dark hat, a wool cloak. This woman was facing a shop window, a large reflective expanse of immaculate glass.

This woman didn’t expect Kate to emerge from the store so quickly, after just ten seconds. The woman hadn’t counted on that. So she’d let herself relax, marginally unhidden, relatively unguarded. And she’d been caught.

TODAY,
1:01
P.M.

Kate unlocks the desk drawer, and the lockbox. She hefts the Beretta, much lighter without its magazine. The smooth black metal is cold in her hand.

She glances at a photo on the desk, a little snapshot in an antique leather frame, the boys laughing in the surf in St-Tropez. More than a year ago now, bronzed and blonded by a summer of sun, teeth glinting white, golden light shimmering off the Mediterranean, late afternoon in late July.

In the end, Dexter left the where-to-live decision up to Kate. He claimed that he preferred the countryside or small-town options, Tuscany or Umbria, Provence or the Côte d’Azur, even the Costa Brava. But Kate suspected that Dexter never really wanted to live in any countryside. Instead, what he wanted was to lose an argument. He wanted to make her feel like she’d won something, like this decision had been hers, despite him.

Kate couldn’t help suspecting that he’d been manipulating her about everything, all the time. A huge reversal, after so many years of believing that he was the least manipulative person she knew.

Her probably superfluous argument for Paris was on behalf of the children. So they would grow up educated and cosmopolitan, not sheltered and spoiled; she didn’t want their sole areas of competence to be tennis and sailing. The grown-ups could always move to Provence when the children had gone to university.

Kate leans back in the chair, the pistol in her palm, thinking about these people: this other couple, strangers who she thought were friends who were pretending to be enemies. And her surprisingly diabolical husband. And her own behavior, both questionable and justified. And what she’s about to do.

She snaps the Beretta’s clip into position. She lifts a hardened panel in the bottom of her handbag—very similar to the compartment in Dexter’s old briefcase, where he kept his secret phone. She drops the handgun into the bottom, then replaces the panel.

Kate reaches across to a cluttered bookshelf, unplugs a mobile from its charger. She hasn’t powered up this phone for more than a year and a half, but she keeps it charged. She turns it on, punches in the long number. She doesn’t store numbers like this one in address books of any sort.

She doesn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line—a woman saying,
“Bonjour”
—but she didn’t expect she would.

“
Je suis
602553,” Kate says.

“One moment, madame.”

Kate looks out the window, over the gabled rooftops of St-Germain, the Seine and the Louvre to the right, the glass domes of the Grand Palais straight ahead, the Eiffel Tower to the left. The sun is peeking through clouds behind her, unseen, painting a golden wash over the city, gilding her lily of a view, almost too perfect.

“Yes, madame. The ladies’ lounge in the Bon Marché. Fifteen minutes.”

Kate glances at her watch.
“Merci.”
She hurries out the door once again, down the elevator and through the lobby and breezeway to the street, the rue du Bac merging onto the boulevard Raspail, weaving south through the dense lunchtime crowds, pushing her way into the department store, onto an escalator, brushing past slowly ambling women to the anteroom outside the restroom, where a pay phone is ringing.

“Hello,” she answers, closing the door behind her.

“
Lovely
to hear your voice,” Hayden says. “It’s been so long.”

“Likewise,” Kate says. “We need to talk, in person.”

“Is there a problem?”

“Not really, no. It’s a solution.”

He doesn’t reply.

“Can we meet at four?” she asks.

“In
Paris
? I’m afraid not. I’m, well, not
near
.”

“But you’re not far. And if I’m not mistaken, you have access to a plane.” Hayden was promoted last year, despite a lifelong career track in the field, not administration. He is now, surprisingly, deputy baron of Europe. A job that comes with use of a jet. As well as discretion on personnel, from the junior officers in Lisbon and Catania to the field chiefs in London and Madrid. Paris too.

He doesn’t respond.

“Do you remember the fifty million euros stolen from a Serbian?” Kate asks.

Pause. “I see.”

“Four o’clock?”

“Let’s make it five.”

24

Kate marveled at how deeply she’d buried her head in the sand. How she’d ignored what she should have seen, long ago: that the Macleans had been monitoring the Moores’ every move, for months.

Jake waved at her from the other side of the store window. Kate waved back. Dexter and the boys were in another shop, a chocolate store, while she stood outside. She could see their eyes wide, their fingers pointing, their whole bodies begging. Kids in a candy shop.

Kate had chosen to pretend she hadn’t seen Julia. She’d turned the other way up Hartenstraat, let her gaze linger in the opposite direction, giving the FBI agent an opportunity to scamper away, unsure whether or not she’d been made.

Now Kate stood in some other
straat
, her mind racing back to what she realized was the beginning of the surveillance: that rainy day—extra-rainy, pouring thick sheets—in late September—more than three months ago—in the parking lot of the Belle Etoile mall in Strassen. Julia claiming that she’d forgotten her phone in Kate’s car. Insisting that Kate stay away, stay dry. Returning to the car alone, installing something subtle and unfindable, then returning to Kate with the slim smile of secret victory. Mona Lisa.

From that moment, Bill and Julia had always known where Kate was.

So the Macleans had known it the following Friday afternoon, when Kate and Dexter set south on the A3, crossing the border into France, cruising by the nuclear reactors at Thionville, veering off at Metz onto the A4 toward Reims. That turn was probably when Julia and Bill decided to give chase, to hop into his little BMW, racing to catch up, closing the gap during their remaining three-hour drive to Paris, slowing down to 140 kph only when their GPS alerted them to speed
cameras. Or maybe not slowing down at all. What did the FBI care about European Union speeding tickets?

And while the Moores were finding a place to park in Paris, the Macleans were still on the highway, hurtling through Champagne, the vineyards littered with trucks parked for the night in the fields, harvest time. They located Kate’s stationary station wagon in a grimy garage. They called around to the nearest hotels, one after the other, until they found the one where there was a junior suite registered to Monsieur et Madame Moore. The Macleans booked their own room nearby, set up surveillance.

The Moores were easy to follow. They moved in a large, slow group, took the Metro and never taxis, walked around crowded streets. They were out in public spaces, all the time.

The Macleans probably took turns—ten minutes on, ten off, trailing each other while they trailed the family—following, waiting for a good opportunity, a natural circumstance, a touristy spot late in the day, an easy chance meeting, an effortless insertion. They’d already called the Moores’ hotel, verified that babysitting was available, knowing they could pull this off, knowing that Dexter and Kate would accept an invitation to a night out, to too much wine, to a fashionable club, to accelerated friendship, to instant intimacy.