The Expats by Chris Pavone Page A

Dexter with tales of Zermatt, Courchevel, Kitzbühel. Bill was one of those experts in everything, a guy who had a favorite Alp resort and Caribbean island and Bordeaux vintage; he’d researched ski bindings and tennis strings, had a preferred British rugby team and cult sixties TV show.
    Dexter was in awe of him.
    Bill picked up the bottle and poured everyone an equal portion of the last drops. Then he shot his cuff to look at his watch, one of those big fat money-guy watches with a metal bracelet. Dexter wore a drugstore Timex.
    “Nearly midnight,” Bill announced.
    “Should we have another bottle?” Julia asked, looking around for demurs, confirmations, noncommitments.
    “Well, we could.” Bill leaned in to the rest of his foursome, conspiratorially. “Or we could go to this place I know.”

    “NOUS SOMMES DES amis de Pierre,” Bill said to the doorman.
    They were standing on the wide sidewalk of the broad, quiet boulevard, just the other side of the Pont d’Alma.
    “Est-il chez lui ce soir?”
    The man behind the velvet rope was big and black and bald. “Votre nom?”
    “Bill Maclean. Je suis americain .”
    The man grinned at this piece of obviousness, and inclined his head at a willowy girl in a silver sheath dress who was standing a few yards away, smoking; she herself looked a bit like a cigarette. The girl flicked aside her butt and sauntered inside.
    Kate and Dexter and Julia and Bill waited, amid a dozen people who were perhaps waiting for the same type of thing. Maybe the same exact thing, from the same person. Other supposed friends of Pierre.
    This was not something Dexter and Kate had ever done in D.C. Or anywhere else. He took her hand, fingertips cold in the brisk autumnair, and tickled her palm with the tip of his forefinger. Kate stifled a giggle at the tingle, at her husband’s secret signal for sex.
    The cigarette-girl reappeared, nodded at the bouncer, then lit a new smoke, and resumed looking bored.
    “Bienvenue, Beel,” the bouncer said.
    A different big and black man, this one with a short afro and beside the rope, not behind it, opened the brass hinge and held aside the thick, braided strand.
    Bill ushered his wife forward, through the gap in the rope. Then he repeated the gesture for Kate, his fingers lightly pressing the fabric of her jacket, his fingertips barely but unmistakably felt through the silk and wool. Kate knew with a jolt that this touch was wrong. Bill hadn’t touched Julia this way.
    “Merci beaucoup.” Bill shook the bouncer’s hand.
    The hallway was dim and red, low light reflected off walls that were both glossy and matte. Kate reached out her hand, and let her fingers trail across the fleur-de-lis flocked in plush velvet against a satin background. The hall widened, and opened, and they were beside a short bar, ordering a bottle of Champagne, Bill laying a credit card on the gleaming wood, swept up by the bartender and stowed next to the register, an open tab.
    Beyond the bar, low tables and couches surrounded a diminutive dance floor. Two women were dancing playfully around one man, who was standing still, letting his head bounce from side to side. Minimalist dancing.
    Bill leaned in to Kate’s ear. “It’s early,” he explained. “There will be more people.”
    “Early? It’s midnight.”
    “This place doesn’t open until eleven. And nobody would show up at eleven.”
    They arrived at the table of a slender olive-skinned man, reeking of cigarettes, his ears littered with rings, his arms with tattoos, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down to his crotch. He and Bill exchanged cheek kisses. Bill introduced him as Pierre, first to Kate, then to Dexter, and finally to “ma femme, Julia.” Pierre seemed surprised that Bill had a wife.
    The Americans took a table beside Pierre’s, populated by a similar-looking man and a pair of modely-looking young women in jeans and slinky blouses and not a single extra ounce of body fat.
    Kate took another sip of