The Expats (24 page)

She stared at the muddy shoes, trying to avoid suspecting him. She’d promised herself that she would set aside suspicion after she married him.

But all people have secrets. Part of being human is having secrets, and being curious about other people’s secrets. Dirty fetishes and debilitating fascinations and shameful defeats and ill-begotten triumphs, humiliating selfishness and repulsive inhumanity. The horrible things that people have thought and done, the lowest points in their lives.

Like marching into a New York hotel and committing cold-blooded murder.

Kate couldn’t pull her eyes away from Dexter’s shoes. Just because she’d found out the Macleans were dirty didn’t mean her husband was clean.

Her mind flashed back to three years ago, midwinter, Washington, D.C., cold and blustery. She’d been rushing across I Street to a meeting at the IMF, huddled against the wind, kicking herself for not calling a
car. A taxi was disgorging a passenger in the circular driveway of the Army and Navy Club Library, and Kate rushed to grab it, but someone descended from the club entrance and climbed in. Kate stopped in her tracks, swiveling her head around to look for another cab. This cold snap was unexpected.

Her eyes fell on a bench across the street, on an angled path in Farragut Square. Not the first bench next to the sidewalk, nor the second; this bench was fifty yards into the park. And sitting on it, wearing the unmistakable red plaid hunting cap that she’d mail-ordered from Arkansas, was Dexter. With an unfamiliar man.

AFTER DEXTER FELL asleep, Kate sat in front of the fire and made a list. A list of the possible reasons for FBI agents on loan to Interpol to be here, in Luxembourg, entwined in the life of an ex-CIA. Kate assigned numerical values to the possibilities’ strength. She couldn’t help but assign the lowest values—ones through fives—to all the explanations that had absolutely nothing to do with herself or Dexter. Then there were some Dexter possibilities that received ones through sevens. Most of them on the harmless side.

But it was the scenarios that revolved around herself that scored the eights and nines, regardless of Hayden’s assurance that these agents weren’t after her. It was more than possible that this was a mix-up; there had always been dishonesty and cross-purposes between the Bureau and the Agency. Or it could be that they were protecting her, watching for someone else who’d be coming after her. Or admittedly her departure from the CIA was abrupt, and possibly suspicious, and maybe some other evidence existed to draw attention, and so she was a suspect in a crime of which she was not guilty.

She carefully placed her list into the glowing embers of the dying fire.

That cold, windy night back in Washington, the old six-over-six windows rattling in their decaying mullions, Kate had struggled with whether—how—to question Dexter about his visit to Farragut Square. In the end, all she could bring herself to ask was “Do anything special today?” And all she’d received in response was “Nope.”

She’d put that aside, sealed in an envelope deep inside her, to be opened only if required. She didn’t want to know, unless she absolutely had to, her husband’s secrets.

16

“Hi,” Dexter said. “How’s everything?” There was static on the line, as there often was when he was calling from these tax shelters, these criminal havens, these places where he went, probably to help crooks hide their money, or whatever he was doing that required him to lie to his wife.

Kate sighed, exasperated with the children, angry at her husband. “Fine,” she said, walking away from the kids. “It’s all wonderful.”

“Really? You sound …”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

She looked out the window, at the eastern sky sliding from weak daylight to dreary night without any discernible sunset.

“Everything’s okay? ”

Everything was not okay, not at all. But what was she going to say, on this open line to Zurich? “Yes,” she answered, staccato, the spit-out syllable signaling that this subject was now closed. “So when are you back?”

Pause. “Yeah. About that.”

“Goddammit.”

“I know, I know. I’m really sorry.”

“Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, Dexter. Thanksgiving.”

“Yeah. But the people I work for don’t know from Thanksgiving. To them, tomorrow is Thursday.”

“Whatever it is, can’t it wait?” she asked. “Can’t someone else do it?”

“Listen. I don’t like this any more than you do.”

“So you say.”

“What does that mean?”

Why was she picking a fight? “Nothing.”

Silence.

She knew why she was picking a fight: because she was furious, because the FBI and Interpol were for some reason in her business, because she’d once made a horrible decision that would haunt her forever, and because the one person in the world she’d trusted without reservation was lying to her.

Perhaps his lie was about something benign. And maybe his lying had nothing to do with her anger. After all, he didn’t force her to have a morally wrenching career. He didn’t force her to keep it a secret. He didn’t force her to have children, to sacrifice her ambition, to quit her job entirely. He didn’t force her to move abroad. He didn’t force her to take care of the children, to do the cleaning and shopping and cooking and laundry, all by herself. He didn’t force her to be alone.

“Can I talk to them?” he asked.

Different zingers kept popping into her brain. She uttered none of them. Because it wasn’t Dexter whom she was furious at. It was herself. And perhaps Dexter wasn’t lying to her at all, and never had.

She put the phone on the counter, walked away from it, as if from a moldy peach.

“Ben!” she cried. “Jake! Your father’s on the phone.”

Ben ran up to her. “But I need to poop!” He was panicked. “Can I poop?”

She was picking a fight because it was Thanksgiving, and she was not thankful.

KATE SPRAWLED ON the sofa, flipping channels, Italian game shows and Spanish soccer matches and bleak BBC dramas and a limitless assortment of programming in French or German. The children were finally asleep, after a frustrating conversation about Dexter’s absence: the boys lamenting it, Kate trying—heroically, in her estimation—to suppress her irrational desire to condemn him, and to instead explain it supportively. Trying to be supportive to her husband and her children; trying to remember that this was also supportive to herself.

She heard the laughter of teenagers spilling out of a bar a block away, the high-pitched squeals reverberating on the cobblestones. She caught strains of English. These were little expats, sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, smoking Marlboro Lights and drinking Red Bull–vodka
concoctions until they threw up in the foyers of the small apartment buildings that surrounded the pubs, whose Portuguese cleaning ladies arrived to work before sunrise, their first order of business to examine the nearby foyers, towing an industrial bucket on steel casters with a mop sitting upright in the wringer, cleaning up teenagers’ vomit.

It wasn’t Dexter’s fault, her anger. It was her own. All the decisions that led to this point had been her own. Including the one not to suspect him of anything.

She stared at the flickering screen, a Dutch channel, an undubbed American made-for-television movie from the mid-eighties. The hairstyles and the clothes, the cars and the furniture, even the lighting, all of it looked like exactly what it was. Amazing how many clues there are in a single screen shot.

Kate could no longer ignore her suspicion of Dexter. She was now aware that ignoring it was exactly what she’d been doing.

She also didn’t want to confront him, to demand an explanation. He wasn’t stupid enough to construct an implausible, unpracticed lie. Quizzing him wasn’t going to accomplish anything other than to alert him that she was suspicious. Asking him questions wasn’t going to be how she found out what was going on. If he were willing to answer truthfully, he’d have told her the truth to begin with. He hadn’t.

Kate knew what she had to do next. But first she needed Dexter to come home. Then she needed him to leave again.

“HELLO FAMILY!” DEXTER yelled from the door. He was holding a bottle of Champagne.

“Daddy!” Both boys came running into the hall, limbs spinning, cartoonish, jumping into their father’s arms, violent, acrobatic hugs. Kate had set them up at the dining table, lined with newsprint, two fresh sets of watercolors, brushes, a whole battery of water cups. The theme was Things I Want to Do on Our Next Holiday. Kate had led off by painting her own Alpine scene, beginning a PR campaign for a revised Christmas plan, while also engaging with the kids in an activity. Two birds. In turn, the boys had created their own snowy scenes, which Kate had affixed to the fridge door. “Manipulative bitch,” she’d have to admit, would be an accurate description of herself.

“What’s that for?” Kate pointed her chef’s knife in the general direction of Dexter’s wine bottle, crested and gold-foiled and beaded with condensation.

“Daddy, come look at what I painted!”

“One minute, Jakie,” he said, then turned back to Kate. “We’re celebrating. I made—
we
made—twenty thousand euros today.”

“What?! How wonderful! How?” Kate had managed to convince herself that there was no upside to being snidely suspicious. What she had to be was upbeat suspicious.

“Remember those derivatives I mentioned?”

“No. What does that even mean?”

He opened his mouth, then shut it, then opened it again to say, “It doesn’t matter. But anyway, I liquidated a bundle of financial instruments today, and twenty K was the profit.” Dexter was still opening cabinets, looking around. He didn’t know where they kept their wineglasses.

“In there.” Again, Kate pointed with the blade. Now that he was so much closer, the knife seemed inappropriate. She put it down.

He popped the cork and poured, foam rushing to the top, settling slowly. “Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she answered. “Congratulations.”

“Daddy!
Please!
”

She carried the bottle into the dining room. Dexter settled at the table, trying to figure out the subjects of the boys’ drying watercolors. The artwork was rather abstract.

He looked happy. Now, she thought, was as good a time as any. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “that instead of the Midi, we should go skiing. For Christmas.”

“Gee”—his standard prelude to facetiousness—“you don’t want this money to have any time to cool off, do you?”

“No, that’s not it. I was thinking this before … you know. All our hotel reservations are cancelable. And there are still open spots at some ski resorts.”

“But the South of France,” he said, “you know it’s in the top five.”

The top five. Right now this list was Paris, London, Tuscany, the Costa Brava, and the broad notion of southern France—the Riviera or Provence, maybe Monaco, which although technically not France, was probably the same thing, except for certain logistical details.

Dexter had told Kate about this list in London, a few weeks earlier. The British-run international school had been unaccountably closed for something British, so they’d hopped the early flight to City Airport, dropped their bags at the hotel by ten
A.M.
, and were off in the dismal
late-autumn weather, private squares and wrought-iron gates, austere facades and cozy-looking carriage houses in the cobblestoned mews. And the beautiful sounds of English, everywhere.