Free The Expats by Chris Pavone Page A

Julia had expedited, because she couldn’t believe her great good fortune at having this incredibly handsome man interested in her.
    “And over the years,” she said, “I’ve discovered that men find me much more interesting when I’m naked.” Kate could tell that Julia wasn’t joking.
    They pulled into the packed parking lot in front of the gargantuan store Cactus. The women sprinted through the punishing rain, then caught their breath under the overhang.
    “Darn.” Julia was rummaging around in her purse. “I must’ve left my phone in your car,” Julia said. “May I go get it?”
    “I’ll come with you,” Kate said.
    “Oh no. This rain is too horrible. You go inside. I’ll run back.”
    Kate picked her car keys out of her bag. “Be my guest.”
    “Thanks.”
    Kate glanced out over the parking lot, the main road, the wet grimness of the suburb, the hulking mass of concrete filled with stores filled with shelves filled with crap that she shouldn’t want, or buy. This outing was a mistake. They should have done something else. Coffee somewhere, or sightseeing in Germany, or lunch in France. Mini-travel.
    Travel was becoming Kate’s avocation. She had started researching the family’s next trips as soon as they’d returned from Copenhagen, which had been their first long weekend away. This upcoming weekend would be a drive to Paris.
    “Thanks,” Julia said, shaking water from her umbrella. She handed over Kate’s keys with a small inscrutable smile.

TODAY, 11:02 A.M.
    Kate makes it to the corner and around it, into the rue de Seine, out of sight from the rue Jacob and anyone there who might be watching her, before she allows herself to pause, to stop walking, to release the breath that she didn’t realize she’d been holding, sinking deeper into thought, into contingencies. Into panic.
    They’d been living in Paris for a year, unremarkably, unostentatiously, attracting no attention, no suspicion. They should be in the clear.
    So why would this woman be here, now?
    The mounting anxiety forces Kate to stop moving, distracted, in the archway of a pair of immense wooden doors. One of the doors creaks open, pushed by a tiny, decrepit woman wearing an impeccable bouclé suit and carrying a cane. She stares at Kate in that bold way that old French women seem to have invented.
    “Bonjour!” the old broad suddenly screams, and Kate almost falls over.
    “Bonjour,” Kate answers. She can see past the woman, to the bright, leafy courtyard at the other end of the dark breezeway whose walls are filled with mailboxes and electrical junctions and rubbish bins and loose wires and chained-up bicycles. Her own building has a similar passage; there are thousands of them in Paris. All competing for the best-place-to-kill-someone award.
    Kate resumes walking, lost in thought. She stops again at the large windows of an art gallery. Contemporary photography. She watches the reflections of the passersby in the windows, mostly women who are dressed like her, and the men who form matched sets. Also a gaggle of German tourists in their sandals and socks, a trio of American youth in their backpacks and tattoos.
    There’s one man walking on her side of the sidewalk too slowly, wearing an ill-fitting suit and the wrong shoes, rubber-soled lace-ups that are too casual, too ugly. She watches him pass, continue up the street, out of view.
    Kate continues to stare through the windows, now looking inside, not at the reflections. A half-dozen people are milling around large, airy rooms that spill one into another. The front door is wedged open with a plastic shim, letting in the fresh autumn breeze. It will be loud in there. Loud enough for Kate to have an unremarkable phone conversation that won’t be overly noted by anyone.
    “Bonjour,” she says to the chic girl at the front desk, interchangeable with all the other pretty young things at the cash registers and hostess stands, installedto attract the money that’s always