The Travelers Read Online Free PDF Page B

piece of paper, a haphazardly folded map. There’s a woman by his side, a stern, disappointed-looking wife.
“Je cherche le café qui s’appelle Le Fouquet’s. Est-ce que vous le connaissez?”
    People are constantly asking Will for directions in places he doesn’t live, and he often knows the answer. The people who are doing the asking are almost always tourists, asking about tourist destinations. People like this man, speaking French with a Russian accent.
    “Oui.”
Will points toward the famous arch.
“Là-bas.”
    “Merci, monsieur. Vous êtes très gentil.”
    Since childhood Will has been an obsessive student of maps, memorizing streets and lakes, inventing routes to Tierra del Fuego and the North Pole, filling his wall-mounted world map with pushpins in a color-coded system to divide natural wonders from man-made attractions, the places he had already been from the ones he wanted to see.
    Past the Grand Palais, Will turns off the boulevard, and the traffic and noise fall away in the quiet elegance of the 8 ème , barely any sidewalk on this street. Will is tired and distracted and not attentive enough, walking too close to the curb, and when a car approaches he needs to jump to the side, to flatten himself against the coarse stone for the Peugeot to wheeze by, the driver’s arm resting on the open window, just a few inches away. Will could reach out and steal the guy’s watch.
    Will turns one corner and another without needing to consult the burgundy
plan
that’s tucked into his back pocket. He finally stops at an elegant Belle Epoque building, TRAVELERS etched on a brass plaque, scratched and tarnished, an old piece of identification that had been affixed to this exposed expanse of limestone wall a half-century ago.
    It’s well known in the
Travelers
family that Paris was the very first overseas bureau, an experiment in a boutique high-end travel agency that surprised everyone with its success. At its height, in the mid-nineties, the magazine operated nearly three dozen overseas bureaus, all of them part travel agency and part magazine outpost, providing New York with local editorial talent and also attracting advertisers and promotional opportunities.
    The past decade has been kind to neither type of business. But in an age when all magazines are casting about for new revenue sources—festivals and conferences, apparel lines and home-decorating services—
Travelers
is the trailblazer, the first to extend its brand recognition and consumer loyalty into a completely different business.
    And some of the travel bureaus are still profitable. Even at ten on a weekday morning, the ground-floor office in Paris is open for business, albeit with only a skeleton crew. One adviser is seated at her desk, directly behind the plate-glass window, holding up
Le Monde
with perfectly manicured hands. There aren’t many customers at this early hour. But extended hours is one of the services that
Travelers
offers in places like Paris.
    Will isn’t here to visit the travel bureau.
    He pushes a plain key card—no markings, just a magnetic strip on a blank white card—flat up against a reader. The front door unlocks with a nearly inaudible click. He climbs the sweeping staircase to the
premier étage
, eighteen-foot ceilings, marble floors, an oversize brass knob set into the middle of the towering double doors.
    Will has no idea what goes on in the rest of this building. He has seen a few people coming or going, but there are no other plaques on doors, no signage of any sort anywhere, no indication of any other place of work.
    He depresses a button on the office door. A soft whoosh as a waist-high panel opens in the wall. He swipes his ID card through a slit, and another door clicks open.
    Will walks into the Paris bureau, one very large room that’s shared, in the abstract, by two people. Today it’s the young French woman; at other times it’s the middle-aged American man. Will has never seen both at the same time.