The Expats (8 page)

“Do you see the napkins sticking out of their back pockets?” She’d found another use for the flimsy tri-folds. She was going to write a book,
101 Uses for Flimsy Napkins
. “You get a point by snatching the napkin out of the other’s pocket, which you have to do by sneaking up behind your opponent. You have to be patient, and careful, and deliberate.”

Dexter looked around, smiling. “This doesn’t seem so bad.”

The sun was low in the southern sky, in what seemed like a winter angle, even though it was still September. A relatively warm day, the children running around in shirtsleeves. But that low sun augured something different. By sunset, Kate knew, the weather would change for the worse; it always did.

Before school pickup, she’d spent the day alone, attending to chores: laundry and its hanging from the drying rack, food shopping, bathroom cleaning. The bathrooms and kitchen were thoroughly streaked from minerals in the heavy water, which made the place reminiscent of an abandoned Antarctic station. She needed decalcifying solution, or bleach, maybe both. So she’d gone to the
hypermarché
—a store so much larger than a regular supermarket that it was called a hypermarket—only to realize that all the labels were in French or German, and this was exactly the type of vocabulary she hadn’t learned
in her pre-move immersion lessons, and would never learn here at her twice-weekly Berlitz class.

Kate went home to collect her pocket dictionary, and returned to the market, via a traffic jam caused by a few dozen tractors parked in the middle of the street: milk farmers, protesting something or other. Mad at the cows; mad cows. Or mad at taxes; that was more likely. Everyone everywhere was mad at taxes. Taxes needed publicists.

Start to finish, it took her two hours to buy a four-euro cleaning product.

She couldn’t explain all that; couldn’t complain. She was not in a position to complain about this life, not yet. Probably not ever. She’d wanted this, had expressed to her husband every confidence that she’d enjoy this. She couldn’t whine.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s not so bad.”

KATE HAD BEEN an obvious candidate: she’d chosen to go to a D.C. college, which correlated with an interest in public service. She was studying not only political science but also Spanish, at a time when the most significant foreign threats were in Latin America, and the most crucial intelligence was from south of the border. Both her parents were dead, and she maintained no close relationships with other family members, or indeed with anyone. She even knew how to handle a gun: her father had been a hunter, and she’d fired her first bolt-action Remington when she was eleven.

She fit the profile perfectly. Her only drawback was that she wasn’t especially patriotic. She’d felt betrayed by her country’s abandonment of her parents, who were essentially left to die because they were poor. Capitalism was heartless. America’s social safety net was woefully insufficient, and the results were inhumane, barbaric. After a dozen years of Republican hegemony, society was becoming more stratified, not less. Bill Clinton hadn’t accomplished anything yet beyond battering the world with the word
hope
.

But it was easy to keep her misgivings to herself, just as she’d always kept everything to herself. She’d never written an angry letter to her senator, nor a vitriolic term paper. She’d never carried a picket sign in solidarity with a striking union, never marched in any protest. It was the early nineties. There wasn’t much political activism to get sucked into against better—or at least cooler—judgment.

The spring of her junior year, Kate was invited to sherry with a professor of international relations, a lifelong academic who Kate eventually learned was also a spotter—a side gig of identifying students who might make good officers. A week later they had coffee in a campus cafeteria, and the professor asked her to a meeting in his office. A governmental outfit was recruiting interns, he’d claimed. They preferred graduate students, but they sometimes considered well-qualified undergrads.

Kate appeared to be perfect material to these recruiters, because she was. And in turn the CIA was perfect for Kate. There had been nothing in her life except vast stretches of disappointment interspersed with brief glimmers of potential. She needed something large to fill her immense emptiness, to corral her potential and focus it, somehow, into something. She was seduced by the romance of it; she was energized by the possibilities.

So she swallowed—with fingers crossed behind her back, lightly—the indoctrination. She accepted that she was playing an important role in a crucial mission against mortal enemies. It was certainly true that America, imperfect as it was, didn’t suffer by comparison to Cuba or Nicaragua or Chile, much less to the tattered remnants of the Soviet Union or the lumbering behemoth of China or even the stagnating, ineffectual social democracies of Western Europe. The United States was the sole remaining superpower, and everyone wants to play for the Yankees. Or nearly everyone.

Kate was welcomed into the new family of the Directorate of Operations, tightly bound and all-encompassing, populated with people like her, smart driven people with questionable capacities for intimacy. She enjoyed her work, even though some aspects woke her in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. She flourished in the Clandestine Service.

Then she somehow managed to make room for Dexter. And before long for children. As Kate’s life filled with this new family—this real family—the secrets did become a problem, a nagging discomfort, an arthritis of the psyche. She had to push aside her old life, her manufactured one, the one bound by sentiments that were not love. She needed the Company less and less. She needed her husband and her children more and more.

She began to sacrifice that old identity to live in her new one. It was the new life, after all, that everyone wanted.

6

“It’s like freshman year of college, isn’t it?”

Dexter spit out a mouthful of toothpaste froth. “What do you mean?”

Kate looked at her husband in the three-paneled mirror, each panel angled in a different direction, collecting scattered reflections and creating a fractured composite. Bathroom Cubism.

“You’re meeting all these new people, trying to figure out who’s going to be your friend, who’s going to be your enemy, who’s going to be the loser you run away from at parties.” The toothbrush was dangling from the side of her mouth, and she shifted it. “Imagining where you’ll hang out, where you’ll buy coffee, where you’ll do whatever. And everybody’s in the same situation, basically: we’re all finding our separate ways, together.”

“That does sound like college,” Dexter said. “But that’s not my life. I spend my days staring at a screen, alone.” He cupped a handful of water to wash away his toothpaste-foam; he was a neat and clean man, a considerate roommate. “Not chatting up new friends.”

Kate too spit, rinsed.

“Do you know that today,” Dexter continued, “I literally did not talk to anyone? Except to order my sandwich at a bakery.
Un petit pain jambon-fromage, merci
. That’s what I said.” He repeated the sentence, ticking off with his fingers. “Ten syllables. To a stranger.”

Kate too was still friendless. She knew the names of people, but she wouldn’t call any of them a legitimate friend. Now that Dexter had laid his superior loneliness on the table, though, she’d feel ridiculous to do the same. “I had lunch with a woman today,” she said. “Julia. We kind of got set up, on a blind date.”

Kate returned the tube of under-eye moisturizer to the cabinet, next to a purely decorative crystal bottle of perfume. The last time she’d worn a scent had been in college, a tiny bottle given by an aspiring boyfriend as a Valentine’s present. But perfumes were habitually eschewed in her line of work; they were noticeable, identifiable, memorable, traceable. All the things you didn’t want to be.

“Get this: she’s from Chicago.”

Dexter caught Kate’s eye in the mirror. “Are you sure you can be friends with her, Kat?” He never passed up an opportunity with this joke, though this time he didn’t seem to be taking his customary glee in it. The joke, like most of his kisses, had become perfunctory.

“I’ll give it my best.” She sniffed the perfume bottle—this one a Valentine’s Day present from a husband. Maybe she’d start wearing this, now that she could. “But Dexter?”

“Mmm?”

“Could you please stop calling me Kat? Or Katherine? I want to be Kate, here.”

“Sorry, I keep forgetting.” He kissed her lips, minty clean. “It’s going to take me some time to get used to my new wife.”

But this kiss was not perfunctory. He dropped his hand to her waist, the elastic band of her underpants. “Chicago, huh?” He chuckled, then moved his lips to her neck, and his hand to her thigh.

Much later, Kate realized that Chicago should have been her first clue.

WHY HAD SHE never admitted the truth to Dexter?

At the beginning of their relationship, obviously, it would have been ridiculous to tell him anything. It wouldn’t have made any sense at least until they were married. But then?

She looked over at him, a book in his lap, as ever. Dexter was a voracious reader—technical magazines and banking journals and serious nonfiction and, bewilderingly, a type of quiet English mystery novel that Kate thought of as women’s fiction. There was always a tall pile at his bedside, his only mess in an otherwise neat, orderly existence.

What was the thing that made her maintain this secret? After they were married, after they had kids? Even after she stopped being an operations officer?

It couldn’t have been solely protocol, although protocol wasn’t completely dismissible. Could it have been as simple as not wanting to admit
that she’d been a liar for so very long? The longer she’d gone without admitting the truth, the worse it became when she contemplated the conversation. “Dexter,” she’d say, “I have something to tell you.” God, it would be horrible.

Also, she didn’t want to admit to Dexter the things she’d done, the types of acts she’d been—still was—capable of. If she couldn’t tell him the whole truth, she was loath to tell any of it. That seemed worse. And since the worst of it was that morning in New York, which was also the reason for the end of it all, her story wouldn’t be complete—it wouldn’t make sense—without explaining that event. And her story wouldn’t be defensible with it.

Plus she had to admit that a small part of her secrecy was that she was holding something back, for herself. If she never told Dexter the truth, she was still reserving the right to return to her old life. To one day be a covert operative again. To be a person who could keep the largest secrets from everyone, including her husband, forever.

KATE HAD REPORTED to the hotel suite in Penn Quarter at nine
A.M.
, as ordered. She’d taken a seat in front of a yellow legal pad, a Bic pen, and a sympathetic-looking middle-aged man named Evan, who for the next eight hours patiently quizzed her on every operation she’d ever participated in, every asset she’d ever run, every loose end she could’ve left untied.

She’d been doing this for nearly three full days when Evan asked, “What about Sarajevo?” They’d already talked through anything she may have failed to get into her mission notes—locations of offices, names of attachés, descriptions of girlfriends. Then they’d moved on to lesser events. Her earliest training missions in Europe: making a drop in a converted palazzo near the Piazza Navona; an overture to a Basque nationalist in Bilbao; following a cash-mule through the cobblestoned streets and private banks of Luxembourg.