The Expats (19 page)

“Est-ce que je peux vous aider
?” the man asked.

Kate returned a blank stare, even though she knew exactly what he was asking.

“Can I ’elp you?” he tried in English.

“Oh!” Kate smiled. “No, thank you. I’m visiting Bill Maclean?”

The man gave her a tight grin; the woman remained silent.

Kate brushed past them.
“Merci!”

Her heart was racing. And this would be the easy part.

BILL’S OFFICE WAS on the top floor, one of two doors in a short, well-lit hall; the first door was unlabeled. She tried his door, but of course it didn’t open. She walked to the window at the end of the hall, and turned the handle to open It—all the windows in Luxembourg worked the same way, with side hinges and top hinges.

She swung open this window, leaned out, surveyed the windows and ledges, possible means of entry. Evergreens shielded the view from the neighboring building.

Kate retreated through the stone-tiled hall. There was a mat at Bill’s door, the name of his company on a brass plaque, a buzzer. There were three locks, and one of them looked like a doozy. The lighting came from two upward-facing sconces, and the big uncurtained window. Nothing in this hall was immediately apparent to be a security camera.

She knelt at his door. She reached into her back pocket and took
out a small leather pouch, well-worn covers bound by a no-nonsense rubber band, holding an assortment of miniature screwdrivers and rubber-handled pins and needle-nose pliers. She set to work intently with the tiny tools in her fingers, her face just inches away. She wouldn’t bother with the two easy locks—low-grade pieces of security, more deterrents than preventatives—unless she could pick the high-end one.

While it was true that she had privacy up here on the top floor, and the luxury of uninterruptable time, she didn’t have forever. And lock-picking had never been an area of particular expertise for her. Locks were not an important part of the Latin American experience—anything worth locking was worth guarding with a live armed body.

What had been important in her line of work were maps, which she was expert in reading. And guns, which she was expert in cleaning, repairing, and firing. She’d needed to master a variety of Spanish dialects, with special emphasis on slang, especially the many vulgar words for genitalia. She’d grown up in a declining city in coastal Connecticut that was undergoing a massive influx of Latin Americans. She’d had plenty of opportunity to learn gutter Spanish, on the streets, as well as proper Spanish, in her own home, from the low-paid babysitters whom Kate’s parents had been able to afford for after-school care, back when she and her sister were still innocent little girls, released from first or third grades at three o’clock into the waiting arms of short, round women named Rosario and Guadelupe.

It had been sporadically necessary for Kate to pilot civilian helicopters and propeller planes. She’d learned how to do both, but not exhaustively, in addition to the standard-issue paramilitary training that she’d undergone during her months on the Farm.

She’d tasted, tested, and snorted small quantities of cocaine from different geographical areas, as well as smoked a sampling of the hemisphere’s marijuana. She knew what it would feel like if someone slipped her a roofie or a dose of LSD.

She could memorize any number up to ten digits long, after hearing it once.

She could kill a person.

But what she couldn’t do was pick this lock, and she didn’t want to waste time on a lost cause.

She approached the second door, the unmarked one. The same brass handle as Bill’s, the same buzzer. No plaque, no mat. She reached up to the molding that surrounded the door frame, and ran her finger slowly
along the half-inch-wide horizontal surface up there, hoping to find a key to this uninhabited space. No such luck.

She stood stock-still, listening for noises.

Nothing.

Kate set to work quickly but calmly on this lock, an easy one. Within thirty seconds the off-the-shelf apparatus clicked quietly open.

She entered a large, dusty, empty room with one window. She opened the window, and leaned out. As expected, there they were: the windows to Bill’s office. In between was a narrow ledge that ran across the bottom of all the windows. This could be done; she’d done something like this before. She took a deep breath and climbed out the window.

KATE STOOD ON the nine-inch-wide ledge in the rain, clinging to the side of the building, three stories above the ground.

There was a lot that could go wrong here. One was that someone would see her through the thick stand of evergreens that separated this building from its neighbor, so she had to move quickly.

Another was that she could fall and die, so she had to move carefully.

She side-shuffled a few inches at a time, her face pressed up against the damp stucco.

She heard a sound behind her and below. She turned her head too fast and too carelessly, and scraped her cheek against the wall. The sound was a tree limb brushing against the roof of a car.

It now felt like her cheek was bleeding, but there was no way to check. She couldn’t get either hand up to her face without losing balance.

She kept going, another few inches, and another, staying balanced, steady, slowly … and another few inches … and then she was there, at the sill to Bill’s window.

Kate paused, allowed herself a few seconds of respite before moving on to the next task.

She was scared, but she felt comfortable with her fear, like the strange pleasure of rubbing a sore muscle, which doesn’t accomplish anything except make you more aware of the pain.

This is where she belonged, up here on this ledge. This is what had been missing from her life.

She removed the tiny flat-head screwdriver from her tight back pocket. She ran it alongside the seam of the window, carefully, smoothly, until she found the catch.

She paused, then gently pulled the screwdriver up.

The lock didn’t release.

She tried again, pulling even more gently.

Again, nothing.

Kate willed herself not to panic, in this panic-worthy predicament. Yet more slowly, she ran the thin, sharp head between the jamb and the frame.

She’d practiced this, on her own window. In the middle of the night, when no one could see. It had taken her twenty minutes, out on that sill, forty feet above the cobblestoned path, but she’d finally figured out how to move a screwdriver up against the catch, and rotate the head ever so slightly, to not only release the catch but also to unlock the window so it would swing open on the vertical hinge, not tilt open on the horizontal.

This window mechanism was the same as her own; they were all the same.

She’d practiced. This had to work.

This
had
to work.

She tried again, slowly, slowly, gently … 
click
.

Kate applied pressure with her knee into the hinge side of the window, and the whole panel swung open slowly. She crouched on the sill, her hands flat against the exterior stucco for balance. She paused, then dove forward into the room, breaking her fall with her hands, rolling softly over yet another polished stone floor, large marble tiles, just like everywhere else in Luxembourg.

She lay still, catching her breath, trying to slow her racing heart. She’d expected that her pulse would accelerate, but this was too much; this was more than she could remember in a long, long time.

Kate shouldn’t continue while in such a thorough state of panic; she didn’t want to make any stupid mistakes. She closed her eyes and lay still, willing her body to calm itself.

Then she stood and looked around.

ON THE FAR side of the room was an exercise bike, parked in front of a small television; also a weight bench and a collection of dumbbells, barbells, and plates, all on a rubberized mat.

There was a desk with a laptop computer, a printer-scanner, a telephone, a scratch pad, a few ballpoints. Some sheets had been torn off the pad. Kate removed the topmost remaining sheet, folded it, put it in her backpack; she’d examine the paper later.

The laptop was open but asleep. She pressed a key to wake it up.

This computer is locked. Please enter your user ID and password
. No sense even trying.

Inside the desk, language dictionaries, more pads and pens. Files hung in a drawer made for hanging files: bank records. A few different accounts, with money flowing back and forth among them, a few hundred thousand total, the sums moving up and down, down and up, over and over, the cycle of investments and dividends, withdrawals and transfers.

The name was Bill’s, the address this apartment’s.

There were magazines, journals, newsletters. General-interest business, and specialized business, and technology, and news. Stacks of them. Kate reached into a pile and pulled out an issue of
The Economist
. All the paper smooth, unruffled, un-dripped-upon with coffee, un-ring-stained by a water glass. Unread, maybe. Or maybe read neatly, without sloppy spillage of beverages. Bill seemed like a neat guy.

Kate leaned back in the swivel chair, looking around without focus while her mind drifted, trying to stumble upon what she should be looking for.

There was a small bedroom. Queen-sized bed, made up sloppily. Soft sheets. Four standard pillows and a large sham. Another spare bed, rumpled. Who sleeps here?

In the drawer of a bedside table, a box of condoms. A depleted box that once held two dozen prophylactics, with only a handful remaining. Who screws here?

Kate lay down next to the condom drawer but kept her feet off to the side, not sullying the sheets. She pressed her face against the top pillow. It smelled like shaving cream, or aftershave or cologne. It smelled like Bill.

She reached her hand out to the bedside table, around back of it, feeling … feeling … nothing there. She slid her hand underneath the table, patting down the particleboard of another piece of Ikea furniture … nothing.

She bent her arm, reached her hand under the bed, under the wooden slats that supported the mattress … and there she felt something, leather … and she moved her hand a few inches …

Kate yanked, knowing exactly what she was pulling out to the side of the bed, then up in front of her. She could see through the bedroom door in a direct sight line to the front door, where, without even intending to, she was now instinctually aiming the Glock 22 that Bill kept in a holster taped to the underside of this bed.

PART II

TODAY,
12:02
P.M.

Kate stands in the French doors of the sitting room, rugs piled upon rugs, high ceilings, wedding-cake moldings, shelves filled with books and bowls, vases with cut flowers, ornate frames for small oil paintings, distressed gilt-edged mirrors.

This thing has been bothering her, rooting around in her subconscious, bumping against the facts and suppositions down amid the foundations of her current beliefs about her life, her husband, how their history came to pass. This thing knocks against memories, forcing her to reexamine them, from the new vantage of another possible explanation to everything. Something about college …