The Expats (54 page)

That same secondhand Audi was still their car. They hadn’t gotten around to buying anything new. Or perhaps they’d simply decided, without discussing it, that the old Audi was nice enough. It was just a car, after all.

“No, you determined, this guy was not that criminal mastermind, and this family was not rich. Nevertheless, your job was to be positive. Because sooner or later you needed to go back to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, a full report in hand, with your career on the line. So what did you do?”

The waiter comes by with a replacement carafe of water, and Kate waits for him to back away down the Parisian sidewalk, dusk falling, lights coming on. The dinner-hour crowd promenading through the
carrefour
is thick, jostling, merry. Kate feels a rush of well-being, in this pleasant place with these clever people, whom she finally understands fully, and this plot that she finds herself appreciating more every second, as if she’s not a participant. The whole thing is goddamn brilliant.

“I give you credit,” Kate says. “I love this bit. What you did was you tried to turn the suspect’s wife. First, you erected a flimsy cover, one you knew would make me suspicious: Chicago. Then you allowed me to know exactly when I’d have the opportunity to break into Bill’s office—you manipulated me into suggesting their midday tennis date, didn’t you?”

Julia picks up her wineglass and takes another minuscule sip, savoring the drop of wine. Savoring the story being constructed around her, about her own ingenuity.

“And in this office, I found nothing much to support your cover story. Which would’ve been easy to fabricate. Yet you did not. Instead, you left a weapon lying around, along with a bunch of condoms. You constructed a fake office that looked exactly like a fake office, for a fake profession. You were from a fake place that I knew would be fake, and you had a fake marriage that looked exactly like a fake marriage. You led me by the hand to all these fakeries. Why?”

“Because I wanted you to find them.”

“Yes. But why?”

“So I could control your discoveries. So you would find out who we were, what we were doing. You would discover that your husband was guilty; the one with the money. The one who could be arrested, indicted. I needed you to get invested in being a part of this crime.
His
crime. And I needed you to be able to figure that out for yourself.”

Kate grins at the irony.

“Well, not exactly for yourself,” Julia admits. “But close enough.”

Kate feels her eyes drawn to the metal dispenser that holds the sugar cubes where, an hour ago, she discreetly inserted Hayden’s transmitter. Her end of the bargain.

“So who was Lester?” Kate asks. “Your fake father not from New Mexico?”

“Les is our boss.”

“Why was he here?”

“This was right after the big theft. Les wanted to see our suspect and his wife, for himself. Were these the people who had just stolen fifty million euros? He quizzed the wife about her dining-out habits in foreign capitals. He wanted to know how many stars the hotels posted. The answer: it was pretty unlikely that
these were the thieves. Nevertheless, Dexter was still the prime suspect. The only suspect, considering of course that he was guilty. So Lester gave it another month to bring the investigation to a close.”

“That’s when you decided to confront me.”

“Yes. You used to be a patriot, after all.” Julia smiles. “And plus we could show you evidence that looked an awful lot like your husband was having an affair with a beautiful young woman in five-star Swiss hotels. You yourself had never slept in a five-star hotel. They don’t have those in Nicaragua, do they?”

“No, they don’t.”

“So we confronted you, to see what you’d do, and bring it to a close.”

Kate remembers that early-January day, the three of them sitting on the cold park bench. When Julia said aloud the wrong number—twenty-five million. The look on Bill’s face as he tried to figure out what that discrepancy could’ve meant. The amount of stolen money, he knew, was double that.

Bill looks at Kate now, the same open, unabashed stare that she’d seen before, in the nightclub in Paris, on the Grand Rue in Luxembourg. A look that admits,
You know who I am
. But that also challenges,
What are you going to do about it?

Kate had underestimated Bill. He’d known the truth well before Julia told him.

Once again, Kate realizes that she’d totally missed a big piece of the puzzle. And this piece? That Bill had been running his own private con. And the person he’d conned was Julia.

34
TODAY,
5:50
P.M.

“You’re kidding.” Hayden had the tiniest of smiles playing across his lips.

“No,” Kate said. “I’m not.”

It was nearly six o’clock. After-work tipplers had begun to arrive at the Georges, tourists with early dinner reservations. One of Hayden’s colleagues had slipped the maître d’ a twenty to buy a perimeter of privacy. But that wouldn’t last long.

“What do you imagine you’d
do
?” Hayden asked.

“I’m fluent in Spanish. And now I’m passable in French. I know a bit about Europe. I can make my way around an embassy, or a consulate, or an NGO office. I haven’t forgotten how to do the things that need doing.”

“Except you don’t know anyone. You don’t have
any
contacts.”

This was exactly why Julia claimed she couldn’t be a decorator in Luxembourg. A short-term excuse. A bogus rationalization. “I realize I’d have to start low on the totem pole. And probably stay there, near the bottom. Forever.”

Hayden leaned away from the table. “Why would you want to do this?”

It had taken Kate so long to admit that she’d no longer wanted her job, her career. That she’d wanted to be a full-time mother. But over the past two years she’d discovered that she’d been mistaken. This wasn’t, after all, what she wanted.

“My kids are in school, my days are … they’re empty, unless I find ways to fill them. But I need a reason to fill them. A reason better than boredom.”

She knew it wouldn’t really be her old job. She’d probably never again carry a weapon; she’d never feel the intense rush of mortal danger lurking outside the door of the next asset meeting. So it would be a weak approximation of her old life, her old career, her old adrenaline. But it would be more than nothing.

On the other hand, it would be a more civilized work environment. Plus she now had a lot of money, and lived in Paris, and her increasingly independent children no longer wore diapers, and she had a closer relationship with her husband … she had a lot. She wanted just a little more.

“What I don’t want,” she continued, “is to worry about my children being abducted by some Latin psychopath. I’m more than willing to have a soft, quiet job.”

Hayden started. “So that was it?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Torres threatened your family?”

Kate didn’t answer. She wasn’t going to admit to a cold-blooded, premeditated assassination of a foreign national on American soil. “I’m willing to make compromises,” she said, pushing past that old transgression, knowing that Hayden too would allow this large sleeping dog to lie unmolested. “And I’m here to make a deal.”

“Okay. What can you offer?”

“The culprit on the stolen fifty million.”

“Interesting.”

“In return, I get my job back.”

He nodded.
“Delighted.”

“Good,” she said.

He reached across the table, his hand extended, to shake on it.

“But,” she said, “there’s a complication.”

His smile fell, along with his hand. “Which is …?”

“I need immunity. For me. And my husband.”

“Immunity? For putting bullets in Torres?
Please
. No one has ever even thought about investi—”

“That’s not it.”

“Is it another murder you’re talking about?”

“I don’t know what you mean by
another
,” she said, still refusing to be incriminated in that old mess. “But no, it’s not a murder. It’s white-collar. Sort of.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“So do we have a deal?”

Hayden didn’t respond for a few seconds, staring at Kate, waiting for her to say more. Finally resigning himself that she wouldn’t.

“I’m sorry, Kate,” he said. “No.”

Kate was due across the river in an hour, to meet Julia and Bill and Dexter. And she needed to get there early, before the others. Before her husband.

She gazed out over the city, the streets that radiated from the museum, the mishmash of rooftops. Resigning herself that she would, after all, need to tell Hayden the truth. If not the entire truth, at least some more of it.

Kate wonders if Hayden himself is in the work van around the corner, listening to this conversation. Or maybe he’s across the street, watching. When she left him
two and a half hours ago, he was unclear what his involvement would be in the rest of the evening. Hayden was skilled at being unclear.

“Your Hail Mary,” Kate says, turning her attention back to Julia, “was confronting me. But this got you nothing. Worse than nothing, because then we cut off all contact with you. You no longer had access to your suspect. Your investigation was now at a permanent-looking impasse. Game over. And suddenly the whole town seemed to be ostracizing you.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Julia says. “Who’d you tell, what?”

“I told Amber Mandelbaum, Southern Jewish supermom and gadfly extraordinaire, that Julia—my best friend!—had shoved her tongue down my husband’s throat. What a bitch. Obviously, we could no longer be friends.”

“Obviously.”

“So you left,” Kate says. “You didn’t have many friends to begin with—you weren’t in Luxembourg to make a real life, after all—and it probably came as a relief to you, Bill, to get away from your mistress. I imagine Jane was challenging. Demanding.”

Julia bristles.

“But I guess that technically speaking she wasn’t a mistress, since you weren’t really married to anyone else.”

Bill remains unresponsive.

“Anyway, you went back to Washington empty-handed. You were sorry—ashamed—to admit that you’d been mistaken: Dexter Moore was not the thief. Interpol file closed. You were back in the full-time clutches of the Bureau, the old grind. But after you’d invested so much time in such an expensive and spectacularly unsuccessful investigation, your star was glowing a lot less bright. Wasn’t it, Julia?”

Julia doesn’t answer.

“So it came as no surprise when you quit. Especially since it had become known that while you two were posing as a couple, you’d become an actual couple.”

Bill shifts in his seat. Dexter is, once again, confused, and wearing it all over his face. Julia gives him a nod, an admission. He shakes his head in wonder.

“This happens frequently, doesn’t it?” Kate continues. “Never happened to me, mind you. But I saw it happen plenty of times. To other operations officers.”

Kate stops talking, wonders how much to push the rest of it, whether there’s any upside. She knows that one of the most dangerous, self-destructive indulgences is to go around proving how smart you are. It’s the type of thing that gets people shot.

But she can’t seem to help herself. “So Julia, when did you bring Bill inside?”

“Does it matter?”

“To me it does.”

“I told him after I quit,” Julia says. “After we quit.”

Kate’s mind is dragged backward, through the past year and a half in France, back to Luxembourg, to the winter before last, past the night in the restaurant when she and Dexter had playacted for the benefit of the FBI’s transmitter, and the previous night when he’d come clean—almost entirely—to Kate.

“You’d been seeing each other how long?”

“A few months.”

Kate glances at Bill, who’s been silent, letting someone else tell his side of the story. Or rather from his half of the narrative.

“Why’d you tell him?”

“I love him,” Julia says. “We’re making our lives together.” She holds up the ring finger. “We’re engaged.”

“That’s nice,” Kate says, a wry half-smile. “Congratulations. But when did you guys first hook up?”