The Expats (50 page)

KATE WOKE WITH a start, in a sweat.

She padded down the dark hall, kissed the boys on the tops of their perfect heads, listened to them breathing, safe and sound.

She looked out the window. Bill was still out there, making sure she wasn’t fleeing.

Dexter was fast asleep, the weight of the world lifted from his shoulders.

But Kate was wide awake, chased by the same demon that haunted her regularly, especially when she was trying to forget it.

THE DESCENT WAS steep and narrow, a sharp ninety-degree turn in the middle of it, another difficult turn on the other side of the garage door onto the narrow stone-walled street, also steeply descending, more sharp turns. Kate guided the car carefully through the narrow streets, up and down the rain-slicked cobblestones, around tight corners. The radio was tuned to France Culture, the morning news, political scandal. She still didn’t understand a quarter of the words, but she was semi-satisfied that she was getting the story. In the backseat the boys were discussing what types of things they most enjoyed cutting or chopping. Jake liked apples; Ben claimed, surprisingly, kiwi.

Kate had achieved that special level of fatigue that was almost hallucinatory. A feeling she remembered from her children’s infancy, awake for the four
A.M.
feeding. And from the missions she’d run, awake for
the three
A.M.
break-ins, the five
A.M.
unscheduled flights from improvised airstrips in jungle clearings.

She led the children through the morning mist across the campus, exchanging hellos and smiles and nods with a dozen friends and acquaintances. She had a quick chat with Claire. She was introduced by Amber to a newly arrived American, a freckle-faced young woman from Seattle with a husband at Amazon, in the converted old brewery down in Grund. Kate agreed to join them for coffee before pickup, six and a half hours from now, the daily window of opportunity to shop and clean and see movies and have affairs with tennis coaches. To live whatever type of secret life you could conjure. Or merely to have unsecret coffee with other expat housewives.

Down the hill, extra-carefully through a dangerous construction zone, across the railroad’s grade crossing, up again, then down to cross the river Alzette in Clausen, then ascending to the Haute Ville, past the turnoff to the grand duke’s
palais
, past the fat arrogant guard with the tinted glasses, back to her spot in the parking garage.
Chirp-chirp
.

It had started to rain again. Kate set off on foot through Centre, streets she knew by heart, every dip and turn, every storefront and shopkeeper.

An old nun stood in front of St-Michel.
“Bonjour,”
she said to Kate.

“Bonjour.”
Kate looked at the nun closely, rimless glasses and close habit under a dark felt coat. Kate now saw that she wasn’t old, this nun; she just looked it from afar. She probably wasn’t any older than Kate.

Onto the montée du Clausen, dramatic vistas on either side of the narrow sloping plateau, wide-open views of browns and grays, wet dun. The rain picked up, a cold steady downpour now. Kate pulled her coat tightly around herself.

A train traversed the gorge on the high aqueduct-style bridge. On the semi-frozen river below, a duck quacked insistently, sounding like a grumpy old man arguing with a cashier. A trio of Japanese tourists wearing plastic ponchos scurried across the street.

Kate climbed to the observation deck atop the fortifications, which were cut through with a maze of tunnels. Hundreds of miles of tunnels ran beneath the city, some of them large enough for horses, furniture, suited-up regiments. During wars the town’s populace would hide—would
live
—in these tunnels, shielding themselves from the carnage above.

Kate took the final step onto the platform. There was another woman
up here, facing away, northeast toward the gleaming EU towers in Kirchberg. Standing atop old Europe, gazing at new.

“You’re wrong,” Kate said.

The woman—Julia—turned to face her.

“And you need to leave us alone.”

Julia shook her head. “You found the money, didn’t you?”

“Goddammit, Julia.” Kate was struggling to keep herself composed. She wasn’t terribly confident she was going to succeed. “It’s simply not true.”

Julia squinted into a burst of sideways-blowing rain. “You’re lying.”

In her entire career, Kate had never lost her temper during a mission, during a confrontation. But when the children were babies they’d sapped her spirit, defeated her patience, and she’d lost her temper regularly. It had become a familiar sensation, the tightness in her chest that preceded a loss of control.

“And I’m going to prove it,” Julia said, taking another step toward Kate, wearing an insufferably smug smile on her preposterously painted lips.

Kate shot her arm up and hand out and slapped Julia across the face, snapping her wrist as she made contact with the wet skin, a hard stinging open-hand slap that left a big red mark.

Julia pressed her hand to her injured face, looked Kate in the eye, a look that seemed like satisfaction. She smiled.

Then she lunged, reaching for Kate’s shoulders, her throat, pushing into her, driving with her legs. Kate staggered back, toward the stairs; she was going to fall down the stairs if she didn’t regain her balance. Kate spun away, coming to a stop against the low stone wall that separated her from a seventy-foot drop.

Kate glanced around, looking at the dangerous cliff that surrounded her on three sides; Julia was standing at the top of the stairs on the fourth side, cutting off the escape route. The Japanese witnesses had disappeared. There were no other tourists, no other sightseers, midweek in a small northern European city in the middle of the winter, in the frigid pouring rain.

They were all alone.

Julia took a step toward Kate, face lowered, jaw tensed, glowering. Another step. Kate was pinned against the wall.

Julia was now just a few feet away. Kate suddenly cocked her arm and threw a quick punch. Julia ducked and spun and brought her hand out of her pocket, a shiny silver something rising.

Kate lashed out with a kick, her right foot knocking into Julia’s hand and the weapon, but the two things didn’t separate, while Kate lost her balance on the slick wet stones. She fell, first her ass and then the back of her head making painful jarring contact with the hard, dense, uneven sandstone.

Everything went black.

But for only a split second. Then Kate’s vision returned in dots and stars and swirls of multicolored light, and she felt herself reaching into her pocket, and then her eyes could make out Julia regaining her balance, spinning back toward Kate, whose own arm was rushing up, a blur and the swish of fabric against fabric.

Julia was standing over Kate, aiming her gun at Kate’s head. And Kate’s matte black Beretta was aimed directly at Julia’s chest.

A BUS RUMBLED by on the street below, hidden from view, shifting gears to make the final push to the top of the steep Clausen hill.

The women stared at each other across the sights of their handguns. They were both soaking wet, water streaming through their hair, across their faces, in their eyes. Kate blinked the water away. Julia wiped her brow with her free left hand.

They continued to stare.

Then without warning Julia lowered her gun. She stared at Kate for a second, then nodded. It was the tiniest of nods, her neck slightly inclining, the angle of her face barely changing. Or maybe her neck and head didn’t move at all; maybe the nod was just in the eyes, a blink. Her cheeks tightened, in what may have been a smile, or a grimace.

Kate would revisit this enigmatic look many times over the next year and a half. Julia was trying to communicate something to her, there in the pouring rain on the observation deck. But Kate couldn’t figure out what it was.

Then Julia turned, and walked across the platform, down the stairs, and out of sight. Gone. For, Kate believed, ever.

“DID YOU HEAR about the Macleans?”

Kate was standing at school, waiting for three o’clock. It was cold but cloudless and bright, the type of day that seemed commonplace back in the American Northeast, high-winter, but that seemed a rare pleasure here, a break from the everyday grayness,
la grisaille
.

The question came from ten feet away, off behind Kate. She didn’t want to turn to face this conversation, but she did want to eavesdrop.

“What about them?”

“They’re leaving. May have already left.”

“Back to America?” This woman’s voice sounded familiar. “Why?”

The giant door opened, and children began to emerge from the building, dazed by the glaring sunshine.

“I don’t know. All I heard was that they’re leaving. From Samantha. You know she works at Luxembourg Relocation Experts? She just received a listing for the Macleans’ apartment. Checked with the broker, and found out that they’re being released from their lease because they’re returning to America, for work. Immediately.”

Jake walked into the sunshine, looking around for his mother, finding her, his face lighting up, as it always did, every day. “Hi Mommy.”

Kate turned and glanced at the gossiping women. One was a vaguely familiar face with vague bits of information. Kate felt this woman’s eyes upon her, a known confederate of Julia Maclean, possibly tainted by whatever had forced the departed into their flight.

The other woman, the one with the familiar voice, was Plain Jane. She met Kate’s eye, then looked down, in unmistakable shame. She probably thought this was about herself; her affair with Bill had ruined his marriage. We all see ourselves as the center of everything.

THE WINTER EBBED away. They spent a week in Barcelona, warmer than the north of the continent, jacket weather instead of coats. A weekend drive to Hamburg. A weekend flight to Vienna. Foreign places, in foreign tongues.

Kate spent a solo weekend in wintry Paris, down on the Friday-morning TGV, a comfortable two-hour ride, then an invigorating walk from Gare de l’Est to lunch in a covered market, oilskin-covered tables and steam billowing from the Vietnamese stall, batter sizzling on the wide crepe pans, plates of architectural pigs’ feet. Popped in and out of the grand department stores on the Grands Boulevards. Visited the Louvre.