The Expats (21 page)

She traversed the windswept plaza in front of the Old Picture Gallery with not another person in sight. The crisscrossing paths created oversized angled shapes of grass, giant geometry, punctuated by far-flung metal sculptures, bordered by leafless trees. It seemed to get colder as she approached the imposing building; its arched windows looked lightless within. She felt as if she were going to a mysterious court, presided by an omniscient judge.

Off to see the Wizard. She’d attempted to show the movie to the boys, giving into Jake’s insistence. But both children fled the room within the first ten minutes, terrified.

Kate paid for her ticket and declined the audio tour; she held on to her handbag and coat. She climbed the stairs, wide and airy expanses of gleaming marble, step after step. She began at the beginning, with the Early Dutch and then Early German Painting, not particularly interested. She moved into the big galleries filled with oversize works by blockbuster artists—Raphael, Botticelli, da Vinci. A pair of Japanese tourists were in here, as everywhere, engrossed in their headsets, cameras dangling.

A man alone, his wool overcoat draped over his arm, stood in front of a da Vinci
Virgin and Child
.

The sun was skimming the southern skyline of downtown Munich, casting distinct rays through the massive windows. She checked her watch: 3:58.

Kate moved into the gallery in the dead center of the building, packed
with big Rubens canvases.
The Death of Seneca
, the philosopher surprisingly buff.
The Lion Hunt
, brutal, barbaric. And the biggest,
The Great Last Judgment
, a heaping pile of naked humanity, being judged from above by Christ, in turn judged from above by His Father.

“It’s in
cred
ible, isn’t it?”

She glanced at the man from the other room, overcoat over arm, wearing a sport jacket and necktie and pocket square, flannel trousers, and suede shoes. Horn-rimmed glasses, carefully groomed silver hair. He was tall and slender, looked like he could’ve been anywhere between forty-five and sixty years old.

“Yes.” She turned her eyes back to the massive canvas.

“It was commissioned for an altar in Neuburg an der Donau—the Danube, to Yanks like us—Upper Bavaria. But the people—the priests, that is—weren’t crazy about all this nudity.” A flick of the hand at the painted flesh. “So the painting hung in the church for only a few decades, often covered, hidden from view, before they got rid of it.”

“Thanks,” she said. “That’s interesting.”

She looked around the room. No one else here. She could see a security guard in one of the adjoining galleries, keeping a close eye on a family with a pair of young children, schoolboys, a whiff of wildness coming off them, menaces to museums, to the weltanschauung of a German museum guard.

“Actually, it’s only semi-interesting. Not more than a four. A generous four.”

The man laughed. “Good to see you, my dear.”

“And you. It’s been a long time.”

14

“So are you still enjoying Munich?” Kate asked. “It’s been forever, hasn’t it?”

Hayden let out another burst of laughter. He had indeed been in Europe forever, his whole career. He’d been in Hungary and Poland for the thick meat of the late Cold War. Here in Germany—Bonn, Berlin, Hamburg—for the arms buildup under Reagan, the ascent of Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet readjustments, German reunification. He was in Brussels for the birth of the EU, the dissolution of borders, the euro. Back to Germany when the whole continent started to respond to the influx of Muslims, the reassertion of reactionary forces, the reemergence of nationalism … Hayden had arrived in Europe at the Berlin Wall’s midlife; it had now been gone for two decades.

Kate had arrived at the Company with the Wall already down. Latin America was the future—our hemisphere, our borders—even though the Sandinistas had been defeated and Clinton was making noise about normalizing with Castro. It didn’t seem at the time that she was walking into that book in the middle of the final chapter. It just seemed like the middle, with the ugliness of the Iran-Contra debacle behind them, the abstractness of the Communist threat dissolved. The future would be concrete, action-oriented, home-turf-relevant results.

And it was. But little by little, year after year, Kate felt herself—her sphere within her directorate—becoming increasingly pointless, a sinking feeling of inefficacy that was hyper-accelerated on September 11, when it could not have mattered less who was in the ascendancy for mayor of Puebla. Although the CIA as an institution rededicated its mission on September 12, Kate as an operations officer never recovered her sense of relevancy. Or irrelevancy.

Throughout it all, Hayden had been right here.

“Love Munich,” he said. “Here, let me show you some
smaller
pictures.”

Kate followed him into a cozy room, one of the northern galleries that faced the entrance plaza, now in the full shadow of gloaming. He walked past the paintings, to the window. She followed his gaze to a man leaning against a lamppost in the foreground of the vast cold plaza, smoking a cigarette, looking up at the windows. Looking up at them.

“So how was the Romantische Straße? The children must’ve loved that silly castle Neuschwanstein. They’re how old?”

“Five and four.”

“Time flies.” Although Hayden had no children of his own, he recognized that many people, at a certain point in their lives, begin to measure time not by their own forward progress but by the ages of their children.

Hayden was still looking out the window, watching the man in the plaza. A woman hurried down the steps. The man stopped leaning on the lamppost. As the woman neared, he tossed his cigarette, and locked arms with her, and they walked together, away. Kate wondered if she and Dexter would ever again walk arm in arm, as they had when they were first dating.

Hayden turned from the window, and approached a small, tidy, dark still-life. A little Flemish masterpiece of light and shadow. “The tallest people in the world,” he said, “are the Dutch. Six-one, on average.”

“For men?”

“For the whole lot of them. Men
and
women.”

“Hmm. That’s a five.”

“Five? That’s all? You’re tough.” He shrugged. “So, what can I do for you?”

Kate reached into the inside pocket of her tweed jacket, handed over the print, the candid photo taken in that Parisian nightclub, seemingly ages ago, but in reality only a month and a half in the past.

Hayden barely glanced at the print before putting it in his pocket. He didn’t want to be seen standing in a museum, looking at a photo in his hand.

“There’s a phone number on the back.”

“A prepaid mobile?”

“That’s right,” she answered, blushing in anticipation of the criticism he was about to level at her. But Hayden could see in her blush that she was already punishing herself for using her home phone to set up this meeting; he didn’t need to mention it.

“Do you know who they are?” Kate asked.

“Should I?”

“I thought maybe they’re with us.”

“They’re not.”

The family with the young children—French—was now in the adjoining gallery. In the gallery beyond the French, maybe sixty yards away, another lone man stood with his back to Kate, wearing his overcoat. He was even wearing a hat, a brown fedora. Indoors.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“As sure as one can be.”

Kate wasn’t entirely convinced, but at the moment there was nothing further she could do about it. “The man on the right is my husband.” She spoke quietly, nearly a whisper, but careful not to actually whisper. Whispers drew attention. “The man on the left calls himself Bill Maclean, a currency trader from Chicago, now living in Luxembourg.”

They started walking again through another well-lit southern gallery, their footsteps echoing through the immense room, under the gaze of saints and martyrs and angels.

“He’s not?”

“No.”

Hayden walked by another Rubens,
The Fall of the Damned
.

Kate glanced up at the painting, horrors upon horrors. “The woman is supposedly his wife, Julia. A little younger than Bill. A Chicago-based decorator.”

Hayden paused, gazing up at
The Sacrifice of Isaac
. Abraham was about to kill his only son, his hand covering the young man’s eyes completely, shielding Isaac from his imminent fate. But an angel had arrived just in time, grabbing the old man’s wrist. The blade falling away, airborne, still dangerous looking, this free-floating weapon. A rogue knife.

“Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking?” Hayden asked.

Kate continued to look up at the immense Rembrandt, at the range of emotion on old Abraham’s face, the horror and grief but also relief. “These people are not who they claim to be,” she said. “Those are not their names. Not their careers.”

She turned her eyes from the canvas to Hayden, and caught a glimpse of the other man, crossing a doorway, a hint of his profile, not enough …

“So?” Hayden asked. “Who are they? What’s your theory? What are we looking for?”

“I think,” she said, voice as low as possible, “they’re going to assassinate someone.”

Hayden raised his eyebrows.

“I know it sounds dubious.”

“But?”

“But they live across the street from the monarch’s palace, with a perfect vantage on multiple unprotected areas. And the security is pitiful. The palace has all the trappings of a secure environment, except for the actual security. If you were looking for one really great place to kill someone, this would be it. If you were looking for a venue to take out a very high-value target—a president, a prime minister—you couldn’t ask for much better.”

“Can’t that just be coincidence?”

“Sure. Their apartment is a nice place to live. But they have weapons. At least one.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen the gun.”

“I have a gun. You too, maybe. And we’re not going to ass
ass
inate anyone.”

Kate gave him a what-are-you-kidding look.

“Are we?”

“Come on. You know what I’m saying.”

“All right,” he admitted. “I’ll grant you that the weapon warrants some suspicion. But there are hundreds of reasons why someone would have a weapon—”

“An American? In Europe?”

“—and only one of them is assassination.”

“Yes, but very few of those reasons are good.”

Hayden shrugged, screwed up his face in a way that suggested he had an opinion he was reluctant to share.

“And what about the false names?” Kate asked.

“Please. Who
doesn’t
have a false name?”

“Normal bankers moving to Luxembourg, that’s who.” Kate was losing patience; Hayden didn’t seem willing to admit even a possibility that these people were killers. “I’ve known quite a few assassins in my time.”

“So have I.”

“And you know that this is how they operate; this is what they do.”

In fact, this is exactly what they’d done when Kate hired a team to take out a Salvadoran general. They’d rented a house up the beach from where they knew the general would turn up, sooner or later: a Barbados vacation villa owned by the general’s primary arms dealer. The
team ended up needing to wait nearly two months, developing deep, rich suntans, and vastly improving their golf games. They even learned to surf.

Finally one evening, at cocktail hour, the woman pushed the nose of her rifle out the second-floor bathroom window, and took a fairly easy three-hundred-yard shot—she could’ve hit her mark at twice the distance, maybe thrice—across one rooftop into the pristinely manicured beachfront garden where the general was reclined on a chaise, a bottle of Banks beer in his hand, and suddenly a large hole in the middle of his head. The other half of the team had the engine running, bags in the trunk, private jet waiting on the tarmac on the east side of the island, thirty minutes away from the brand-new crime scene at Payne’s Bay.

Kate caught another glimpse of the man in the other gallery. She kept the corner of her eye on him. “And something happened in Paris. We were attacked late at night, and he fought off the muggers … his behavior was too, I don’t know, too …”

“Too professional?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, I’ll indulge you: if they
are
assassins, who’s their target?”

“No idea. But there are important people traipsing through the palace all the time.”

“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down, does it?”

Kate shook her head.

“Listen, I don’t … how can I put this? … I don’t think it’s credible that anyone would hire assassins in a man-and-wife team for—how long has this been going on?”

“About three months.”

“For a quarter-year, on the chance that this arrangement will eventually afford a takeable shot on, frankly, anyone. No matter how insufficient you think the security is at this palace, an entire different level can be established anywhere, at any
time
, in forty-eight hours.”

She saw the man in the other gallery move closer.

“I’m sorry,” Hayden continued. “I agree that these characters sound suspicious. But I think you’ve misread the situation. They’re not assassins.”

Kate suddenly knew that of course he was right. She couldn’t believe she’d invested so much in such a harebrained theory; that she’d so willfully constructed a scenario so obviously contrary to fact. She’d been an idiot.

So why were the Macleans in Luxembourg? Kate’s consciousness
chased something into a corner of her mind, a dark corner that she tried—but rarely succeeded—to forget.

“And if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Yes?”

“What’s it to you?”

Kate couldn’t think of an answer other than the truth, which was something she couldn’t admit: that she was afraid they were pursuing her, because of the Torres debacle.

“You might want to just let this go,” Hayden said.

She turned to him, saw the look of warning. “Why?”

“You might not like what you find.”

Kate searched Hayden’s face for more, but he wasn’t giving it. And she couldn’t ask for it without explaining why.